ABOUT THIS BOOK

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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

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

REVIEWS

“Before his paradigm-shattering work on globalization, Arjun Appadurai wrote some scintillating essays on agriculture in India. Collected together for the first time, these essays represent a magnificent contribution to agrarian studies and rurality, and demonstrate the power of cultural analysis for understanding the everyday activities of food production and distribution.”

— Akhil Gupta, author of Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India and Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India.

“Appadurai makes a bold and original case for agricultural reason through a densely textured study of what he calls subsistence capitalism in the villages of western India. In these essays, he rescues peasant rationality from the condescension of those who would limit it to the mere reproduction of local cosmologies. By closely looking at the sociality that undergirds social hierarchy, he shows us how peasants generate everyday concepts and a theory of relationality as much as techniques of production. This book brings peasants back into discussions of contemporary capitalism, not as detritus but as conscious actors. A wonderful and timely publication.”

— Dilip Menon, editor of Changing Theory: Concepts from the Global South and Capitalisms: Towards a Global History

“One of anthropology’s most distinguished practitioners returns to his fieldwork in rural India to reflect more broadly on the nature of ‘subsistence capitalism,’ in whose shadow growing numbers of the world’s population must live. In such precarious conditions, he reminds us, people seek their bulwark—and their measure of value—in an everyday give-and-take, a ‘stubborn sociality,’ that is their hedge against immiseration. The penetrating insights offered here are as relevant to the poor of post-industrial cities today as they were to farmers in rural Maharashtra. A scintillating read!”

— Jean Comaroff, coauthor of Theory from the South: Or How Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa and Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments
Introduction
chapter 1 Andaj
chapter 2 Small-Scale Techniques and Large-Scale Objectives
chapter 3 Wells in Western India: Irrigation and Cooperation in an Agricultural Society
chapter 4 Dietary Improvisation in an Agricultural Economy
chapter 5 Technology and the Reproduction of Values in Rural
Western India
References
Index