State of Nature: Argiculture,Development,and the Making of Organic Uttarakhand.

详细信息   

• 作者：Seshia Galvin ; Shaila.
• 学历：Ph.D.
• 年：2013
• 导师：Dove, Michael R.,eadvisorSivaramakrishnan, Kalyanakrishnan,eadvisorHebert, Karenecommittee memberScott, James C.ecommittee member
• 毕业院校：Yale University
• Department：Anthropology and Forestry and Environmental Studies
• ISBN：9781303316678
• CBH：3571849
• Country：USA
• 语种：English
• FileSize：19018283
• Pages：371

文摘

Focusing on a strategy to promote commercially-oriented, globally ambitious organic agriculture in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand, this dissertation examines intersecting processes of state and market formation as they are wrought in agrarian landscapes and reshape the identities of those who cultivate them. At the outset of the new millennium, on November 9, 2000, Uttarakhand became the newest state of the Indian Union. Shortly after its formation, and in the wake of over a decade of liberalizing economic reforms across India, the government of this Himalayan state worked to develop organic agriculture as a key component of rural development. In doing so, it promoted an ideal of "Organic Uttarakhand" that invoked an historical and mythic ecological imagination of the region as "pure and pristine" against Indias Green Revolution past and the transgenic frontiers of its present. While Himalayan nature has long been seen as a foil to modernity both within and outside the region, the promotion of "Organic Uttarakhand" marked a significant shift in this relation as claims to nature instead became part of what it means to be modern in Uttarakhand in the twenty-first century. The central argument of this dissertation is that the promotion and development of organic agriculture in Uttarakhand refigures this enduring relation of nature and modernity within the region, enabling new expressions of agrarian identity and agency through interconnected processes of state and market formation. This dissertation is based on twenty months of ethnographic and archival research conducted largely from 2007 to 2008. It weaves together the cultural and historical study of place-making, institutional ethnography of a development strategy in the state governments agricultural and organic bureaucracies, and classic rural ethnography in two locales&mdash；the fertile Doon Valley in the vicinity of the state capital of Dehradun and the mountainous tribal region of Jaunsar Bawar. Through ethnographic research, it examines the daily work of state and market formation as they are interlinked through contract farming, organic certification, composting technologies, and agricultural marketing, and animated by farmers, cultivators, government functionaries and company representatives. The interdisciplinary and multi-sited research design enables study of the formation of states, markets, and selves concurrently, and in conjunction with each other, without privileging one over the other. By elucidating connections in these areas, which are often studied and conceptualized discretely, the dissertation generates theoretical and ethnographic insights about the contemporary constitution of modernity, nature, and agrarian capitalism in contemporary India.