What do you think?
Rate this book
Agricultural Reason in the Shadow of Subsistence Capitalism: A Rural Ontology from Western India
Analysis of an agrarian society confronted with capitalism.
This collection of essays on early 1980s India is one of the few anthropological treatments of agricultural reasoning. It offers a close look at an agrarian society at the pivotal moment of its encounter with capitalist transformation and studies ideas of measurement, sociality, and independence.
This collection of essays on early 1980s India is one of the few anthropological treatments of agricultural reasoning. It offers a close look at an agrarian society at the pivotal moment of its encounter with capitalist transformation and studies ideas of measurement, sociality, and independence.
158 pages, Paperback
Published August 26, 2024
4 people want to read
About the author
Arjun Appadurai
61 books109 followersArjun Appadurai is an Indian-American anthropologist recognized as a major theorist in globalization studies. In his anthropological work, he discusses the importance of the modernity of nation states and globalization
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
February 27, 2026
Loved reading this a lot! Amazing this book came out just last year when I was just trying to scour Appadurai’s early essays on agrarian anthropology and lo behold he publishes them as a collection with a retrospective introduction.
The main anthropological concern for Appadurai in these essays was to flesh out a theory of anthropological reasoning that did not fall into traps of either treating all forms of calculative and instrumental rationality as imposed capitalist Ideology (mostly popularized by Sahlin) or not being too relativist by isolating modes of thinking entirely onto cultural specificities. And thus, he takes up the difficult task of anthropologically exploring agrarian logic that is inscribed and embedded culturally while also locating it in the uneven political economy.
My own experiences in documenting agricultural knowledge left me convinced that documentation is not a sustainable way to preserve this knowledge because that is exactly what it does - freeze and preserve a set of facts in written text. This seemed unfit for a type of dialogical knowledge that was not obtained from training or instruction but was organically accumulated through experiences and interactions during a certain times and in certain places by doing certain things. The generation and circulation of these knowledges involved a far more multi-directional processes and context that are different from academic knowledge systems people like me and the people for whom I was documenting were used to. While I have been to trying to grapple with these thoughts myself, this book aided me with cutting-edge anthropological analysis on how to think clearly about such questions.
Back to the essays, my favourite are probably ‘Andaj’, where he argues that the ‘gaps’ between technical and standardised terms of measurement and local terms of measurement are not just gaps of translation but are reveal a different epistemology itself wherein the standardised, authoritative and context-free measurements come face to face with variability, sociality and approximations that are part of the agrarian ontology they occupy. Another essay that I really enjoyed was ‘Dietary Improvisations in Agricultural Economy’ where he brilliantly builds a framework on the different factors involved at a micro-level on decision-making by rural women for preparation of food in households, and how these micro-worlds are not really isolated household level processes but form a network in itself due to the different exchange relations involved. In both these essays (and throughout the book), Appadurai’s commitment to representing rural people’s perceptions in their own terms while not either flattening them to universal rationality or exoticising them to cultural specificity was commendable. I was also sweetly surprised by the sentimentality and concern that Appadurai explicitly expressed on loss of knowledge systems and sociality in rural life in the context of subsistence capitalism, in the final essay (in which there was also exceptional archival work).
Bonus of reading this book instead of just the standalone essays he published over decades was definitely the intro chapter where he reminiscences why he came to be interested in this topic and the influences he had. At the outset, the analytically clarity with which he clearly defines and articulates highly complicated and contested terms like ‘sociality’, ‘agricultural reasoning’ and ‘subsistence capitalism’ and how he constantly grounds them in his ethnographic work was very very impressive to read. Definitely going to cite this one to death for a while now
The main anthropological concern for Appadurai in these essays was to flesh out a theory of anthropological reasoning that did not fall into traps of either treating all forms of calculative and instrumental rationality as imposed capitalist Ideology (mostly popularized by Sahlin) or not being too relativist by isolating modes of thinking entirely onto cultural specificities. And thus, he takes up the difficult task of anthropologically exploring agrarian logic that is inscribed and embedded culturally while also locating it in the uneven political economy.
My own experiences in documenting agricultural knowledge left me convinced that documentation is not a sustainable way to preserve this knowledge because that is exactly what it does - freeze and preserve a set of facts in written text. This seemed unfit for a type of dialogical knowledge that was not obtained from training or instruction but was organically accumulated through experiences and interactions during a certain times and in certain places by doing certain things. The generation and circulation of these knowledges involved a far more multi-directional processes and context that are different from academic knowledge systems people like me and the people for whom I was documenting were used to. While I have been to trying to grapple with these thoughts myself, this book aided me with cutting-edge anthropological analysis on how to think clearly about such questions.
Back to the essays, my favourite are probably ‘Andaj’, where he argues that the ‘gaps’ between technical and standardised terms of measurement and local terms of measurement are not just gaps of translation but are reveal a different epistemology itself wherein the standardised, authoritative and context-free measurements come face to face with variability, sociality and approximations that are part of the agrarian ontology they occupy. Another essay that I really enjoyed was ‘Dietary Improvisations in Agricultural Economy’ where he brilliantly builds a framework on the different factors involved at a micro-level on decision-making by rural women for preparation of food in households, and how these micro-worlds are not really isolated household level processes but form a network in itself due to the different exchange relations involved. In both these essays (and throughout the book), Appadurai’s commitment to representing rural people’s perceptions in their own terms while not either flattening them to universal rationality or exoticising them to cultural specificity was commendable. I was also sweetly surprised by the sentimentality and concern that Appadurai explicitly expressed on loss of knowledge systems and sociality in rural life in the context of subsistence capitalism, in the final essay (in which there was also exceptional archival work).
Bonus of reading this book instead of just the standalone essays he published over decades was definitely the intro chapter where he reminiscences why he came to be interested in this topic and the influences he had. At the outset, the analytically clarity with which he clearly defines and articulates highly complicated and contested terms like ‘sociality’, ‘agricultural reasoning’ and ‘subsistence capitalism’ and how he constantly grounds them in his ethnographic work was very very impressive to read. Definitely going to cite this one to death for a while now
Displaying 1 of 1 review