This article reflects on the challenge of making ‘farmers’ suicides’ an object ethnographic enquiry. is not just a matter methods, ethics and access but also categorical choices involved in studying this over-determined politicised category self-killing. Drawing fieldwork Wayanad district Kerala, argues that are self-evident types rural death, become reified visible through state’s enumerative practices. state-defined category, conveyed scandalised by media, rests connection between suicide...

ABSTRACT This article engages ethnographically with the neoliberalization of nature in spheres tourism, conservation and agriculture. Drawing on a case study Wayanad district, Kerala, explores number themes. First, it shows how boom domestic tourism is currently transforming into landscape for tourist consumption. Second, examines articulates projects neoliberalizing forest wildlife their contestations by subaltern groups. Third, argues that contemporary commodification intimately related to...

Abstract This paper argues that Indian farmers’ suicides may fruitfully be described as public deaths. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the South district of Wayanad (Kerala), it shows become ‘public deaths’ only via enumerative and statistical practices state their scandalization media. The political nature suicide death thus depends entirely rates production by itself. But power representations complicates critique knowledge about suicide. In a context like Wayanad, which had been...

This special issue brings together ethnographic accounts exploring local and regional effects of transformations in India that social scientists have described under the heading ‘neoliberalism’ (Alternative Survey Group 2007; Oza 2006; Patnaik 2007). Chief among these are economic restructuring processes after 1991 when Government launched far-reaching policies liberalisation, arguably pressure global financial institutions. Acknowledging this significant turning point, we aim to highlight,...

Responding to agrarian crisis at home, cash crop cultivators hailing from the South Indian district of Wayanad increasingly engage in seasonal production ginger other states India. This is a purely profit-based and unsustainable boom that takes toll on both labor environment. ethnographic analysis speculative cultivation situates this emerging economic complex regional political ecology, farming practices, individual farmers' hopes aspirations, relation qualities as cultivar. It argues...

In response to an agrarian crisis, small-scale farmers in South India are experimenting with the application of agricultural ferments their degraded soils. This article focuses on Nectar Life, a fermented preparation made by practitioners Zero Budget Natural Farming out urine and dung native cows. Based ethnography Wayanad, Kerala, textual analysis statements Subhash Palekar, inventor ferment, I unpack its recipe ingredient show that fermenting Life enacts microbial ontology agriculture....

Scientific evidence and knowledge are central to movements for environmental justice. Cases of pesticide toxicity have often led the emergence controversies around nature its causal connection observed pathologies. Toxic effects depend on multiple, situated socioecological conditions such as time place, duration, mode administration, making quantifiable etiology tenuous. Research toxic exposure issues has shown limitations regulatory sciences in establishing causality argued bringing various...

Abstract. The Anthropocene reorients the agrarian question as an ecological of planetary scale. Rather than resolving inherent tension between political economy and biophysical environment by moving ecology closer to natural sciences, we propose active engagement with impulses from environmental humanities anthropological engagements alternative ontologies. relational agriculture that outline in this article draws on feminist science studies, multispecies ethnography, new materialism...

Abstract Tibet’s wild fungus cordyceps ( Ophiocordyceps sinensis ), a prized commodity in metropolitan China, has been undergoing changes the way it is traded and marketed Tibet. Prized as medicinal tonic high-value gift, parasitic traditionally its dried form. However, recent years we have observed emergence of trade fresh cordyceps. This paper seeks to make sense this change form correlation changing meanings China. Based on ethnographic fieldwork Tibet textual analysis online markets...