Spiritual Farming and the Demons of the Market: Agrarian Crisis and the Cultural Politics of Food Sovereignty in South India

0441514 - EÚ 2015 RIV eng U - Uspořádání akce
Uherek, Zdeněk - Miltová, A. - Brož, Luděk - Pěničková, D.
Spiritual Farming and the Demons of the Market: Agrarian Crisis and the Cultural Politics of Food Sovereignty in South India.
[Praha, 11.12.2014, (W-EUR 20/6)]
Institucionální podpora: RVO:68378076
Klíčová slova: social anthropology * South India * agriculture
Kód oboru RIV: AC - Archeologie, antropologie, etnologie
http://eu.avcr.cz/miranda2/export/sitesavcr/data.avcr.cz/humansci/eu/Pracoviste/Oddeleni_etnickych_studii/Probihajici_granty/Gellner_Seminar_147_Daniel_Munster.pdf

In critical nature-society studies, food sovereignty movements, such as La Vía Campesina, are among the more hopeful movements towards a global agro-ecological transition. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among the "zero budget spiritual farming" movement in Kerala, this paper demonstrate how this food sovereignty movement represents a novel metabolic relationships between humans, soils and livestock. Emerging in the context of a protracted agrarian crisis and an epidemic of farmers' suicides the zero budget spiritual farming movement embodies hope by drawing on three registers: Firstly, it builds on the affective labor of restoring soil fertility and intimacy in human non-human relations by utilizing an innovative technology, putatively built on Vedic knowledge, of fermenting urine and dung of native cow breeds. Secondly, the movement aims at building alternative economic rationalities by insulating farmers from the market by avoiding certain substances such as hybrid cows, hybrid seeds and chemical biocides, and relations, such as loans, that are rendered demonic as well as by propagating a renunciation of consumerism. Thirdly, the movement rests on a self-reflective critique of science, in particular the agronomy of the Green revolution. Presenting the case of zero budget spiritual farming this paper argues for a perspective in agrarian nature-society studies that combines insights into the hybrid natures of agriculture and emerging affective politics in agroecology with a political economy perspective. This movement gains as much of its force from being situated in the context of a neoliberal political- ecological crisis and its critique as it does from its emerging ontologies produced by practices of care and affect.
Trvalý link: http://hdl.handle.net/11104/0244527