Agricultural Reason in the Shadow of Subsistence Capitalism : A Rural Ontology from Western India

Analysis of an agrarian society confronted with capitalism.

This collection of essays by Arjun Appadurai based on his fieldwork in rural Maharashtra, India, in the early 1980s is one of the few anthropological treatments of agricultural reasoning. In conversation with agronomists, economists, and development anthropologists, the essays explore the ways agricultural technologies, changes in how surface wells are dug and managed, the provision and sharing of food and management of time, issues of scale in studying rural lives, and how local knowledge is formed and transformed reveal the distinctive character of rural Indian sociality. Locating these features in the context of “subsistence capitalism,” Appadurai draws our attention to the importance of relational practices and the pull of autonomy. These essays offer a close look at an agrarian society at the pivotal moment of its encounter with capitalist transformation and study ideas of measurement, sociality, and independence.

Arjun Appadurai is professor emeritus of media, culture, and communication at New York University. His books include Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger, The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition, Banking on Words: The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative Finance, and Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization.