Cultivating Autonomy: Scale, Adapt (Habit), and Agrarian Futures in Central India
My dissertation analyzes how various actors in India imagine and enact agrarian futures at the intersection of cooperative development, sustainable agriculture, and women’s empowerment movements. Amid an ongoing agrarian crisis – marked by rising input costs, ecological degradation, and volatile markets – government officials, NGO leaders, and activists have promoted sustainable practices and market-oriented cooperatives as scalable solutions. Women, mobilized through India’s extensive microcredit infrastructure, and Adivasi (indigenous) communities – cast as both “backward” and ecologically attuned – have become central agents in these development imaginaries. Working across national advocacy networks and on-the-ground implementing institutions, this dissertation asks: how do differently situated actors – farmers, policymakers, and NGO workers – conceive of agrarian futures and negotiate ideological and material difference in pursuing them? Based on five months of virtual ethnography and fifteen months of in-person fieldwork across advocacy networks and within an all-women’s, Adivasi-majority producer company and its partner NGO in Madhya Pradesh, India, I show that autonomy – understood as both individual and collective self-authorship – becomes a key site of contestation within these projects, from collective institutions to the everyday habits (aadat) through which it is lived. Whether framed as the self-sufficient cooperative, the self-reliant farm, or the empowered marginalized woman, autonomy animates these initiatives in ways that both resonate with and diverge from Adivasis’ own aspirations for dignity, economic security, and rest. By foregrounding these frictions, this dissertation asks whose visions of agrarian futures are being built, who is enlisted to build them, and with what political and material consequences.
Meeting ID: 991 4014 0559
PW: 835030
