“Show Farmers”: Transformation and Performance in Telangana, India

Flachs, Andrew

doi:10.1111/cuag.12085

Cited by 12 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…Busse and Sharp (2019) made those shared values explicit and visible through morality in the context of transactions, what Carrier (2018) previously calls "moral economy", occurring in the Papua New Guinea marketplaces. By foregrounding the struggle of Caribbean banana farmers to persist in agriculture, what Moberg (2014) evoked is the paradox of economic morality where Fair Trade certification frequently violates farmers' moral economic relationships that occur through the realm of consumer choice (Flachs 2017).…”

Section: Place and Provenancementioning

confidence: 99%

Indigenous Meanings of Provenance in the Context of Alternative Food Movements and Supply-Chain Traceability: A Review

et al. 2021

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This article reviews the concept of provenance from both contemporary and traditional aspects. The incorporation of indigenous meanings and conceptualizations of belonging into provenance are explored. First, we consider how the gradual transformation of marketplaces into market and consumer activism catalyzed the need for provenance. Guided by this, we discuss the meaning of provenance from an indigenous and non-indigenous rationale. Driven by the need for a qualitative understanding of food, the scholarship has utilized different epistemologies to demonstrate how authentic connections are cultivated and protected by animistic approaches. As a tool to mobilize place, we suggest that provenance should be embedded in the immediate local context. Historic place-based indigenous knowledge systems, values, and lifeways should be seen as a model for new projects. This review offers a comprehensive collection of research material with emphasis on a variety of fields including anthropology, economic geography, sociology, and biology, which clarifies the meaning of provenance in alternative food systems. It questions the current practices of spatial confinement by stakeholders and governments that are currently applied to the concepts of provenance in foods, and instead proposes a holistic approach to understand both indigenous and non-indigenous ideologies but with an emphasis on Maori culture and its perspectives.

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Section: Place and Provenancementioning

confidence: 99%

Indigenous Meanings of Provenance in the Context of Alternative Food Movements and Supply-Chain Traceability: A Review

et al. 2021

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“…Like all such "show farmers" (Flachs 2017;Stone 2014), Mahesh was instrumental not only when PANTA wanted to gain trust in the village but also when they needed to adapt agricultural theory to local practice. When I asked if the NGO used any of his suggestions, Mahesh grinned.…”

Section: Mahesh and The Benefits Of Celebritymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Such "show farmers" (Stone 2014) or "superlative sufferers" (Heller 2018) illustrate the potential of agricultural development programs and humanitarian interventions. Within the context of agricultural development, these kinds of performances serve a variety of different purposes for the farmers, programs, and documenters involved: they secure access to social and economic resources (Flachs 2017;Heller 2018); i) they allow development subjects and aid recipients, broadly defined, to develop a narrative that orders their experiences (Escobar 2011;James 2010); ii) they provide a means by which these people can shape development to their own interests and agendas (Flachs 2016); iii) they emerge from improvisational responses to unexpected variables in social and agricultural life (Richards 1993) as well as from carefully planned engagements with development organizations and ecological constraints (Batterbury 1996); iv) and, of course, they provide first-hand testimonials for larger institutions.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Development roles: contingency and performance in alternative agriculture in Telangana, India

Flachs

2018

Journal of Political Ecology

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Paul Richards invokes the metaphor of performance in agriculture to highlight the ways in which farmers improvise and draw on repertory knowledge to address new and unexpected problems in the field. This skillset helps farmers respond to shifting weather patterns or changing pest cycles, but it also helps farmers take advantage of new markets, technologies, and development interventions – a question of planning and context as much as improvisation in the moment. This article discusses two intervention failures and one success in Telangana cotton agriculture, arguing that such agricultural interventions succeed when farmers can align development performances with their own visions of development and agricultural success. In doing so, it offers a political ecology of farmer performance on two levels. First, it brings attention to the ecological and socioeconomic factors that inspire performances and structure farmer improvisations. Second, it argues that development initiatives must recognize their efforts as embedded within local agricultural planning and contingent on local calculations of social capital. In two ultimately unsuccessful interventions, farmers withdrew from programs that required investments of time and agricultural methods but did not underwrite important social and agricultural vulnerabilities identified by participants. In one successful intervention, farmers found that an NGO's willingness to respond to their agricultural needs and provide a stage for the cultivation of a local celebrity more than compensated for the new demands of non-certified organic agriculture. In a rural Indian context, where farming is a moral as well as agricultural process, the performance of a development identity is an integral part of performances and plans that guide farmer decision-making. Because these performances create a knowledge that cannot be separated from actors, roles, and stages present, these contingent performances ultimately have lasting impacts on the agrarian landscape.Key Words: India, alternative agriculture, performance, knowledge

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“…It was about tinkering with and celebrating new low cost technologies for recuperating small-scale agriculture. As we walked back towards the house Mr. Kumar revealed his plans to make Mr. Appachan's farm a model farm for the experimental application of jīvāmṛta for paddy cultivation (on model farms see also Flachs 2017). The collaboration between the alternative farmer and the state agronomist occurred at a moment in which it would be easy to dismiss science as inhumane and flawed (Shiva 1991) and alternative agriculture as reactionary and nativist (Nanda 2003).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Performing alternative agriculture: critique and recuperation in Zero Budget Natural Farming, South India

Muenster¹

2018

Journal of Political Ecology

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This article explores how 'Zero Budget Natural Farming', an Indian natural farming movement centered on its founder and guru Subhash Palekar, enacts alternative agrarian worlds through the dual practices of critique and recuperation. Based on fieldwork among practitioners in the South Indian state of Kerala and on participation in teaching events held by Palekar, I describe the movement's critique of the agronomic mainstream (state extension services, agricultural universities, and scientists) and their recuperative practices of restoring small-scale cultivation based on Indian agroecological principles and biologies. Their critique combines familiar political-ecological arguments against productionism, and the injustices of the global food regime, with Hindu nationalist tropes highlighting Western conspiracies and corrupt science. For their recuperative work, these natural farmers draw, on one hand, on travelling agroecological technologies (fermentation, spacing, mulching, cow based farming) and current 'probiotic', microbiological, and symbiotic understandings of soil and agriculture. On the other hand, they use Hindu nativist tropes, insisting on the exceptional properties of agrarian species native to, and belonging to India. I use the idea of ontological politics to describe the movement's performances as enacting an alternative rural world, in which humans, other-than-human animals, plants, mycorrhizae, and microbes are doing agriculture together.Keywords: agricultural anthropology; alternative agricultures; naturecultures; critique; ontological politics; small-scale cultivators; India; Kerala; Subhash Palekar

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“Show Farmers”: Transformation and Performance in Telangana, India

Cited by 12 publications

References 19 publications

Indigenous Meanings of Provenance in the Context of Alternative Food Movements and Supply-Chain Traceability: A Review

Indigenous Meanings of Provenance in the Context of Alternative Food Movements and Supply-Chain Traceability: A Review

Development roles: contingency and performance in alternative agriculture in Telangana, India

Performing alternative agriculture: critique and recuperation in Zero Budget Natural Farming, South India

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