Aarti Sethi

Research

My research interests broadly focus on the transformation of rural life-worlds and agrarian capitalism. My current manuscript, Cotton Fever in Central India, examines cash-crop economies to understand how monetary debt undertaken for transgenic cotton-cultivation transforms intimate, social and productive relations in rural society. With the introduction of genetically modified cotton-seeds, over a quarter of a million cotton-farmers have committed suicide in central India, unable to repay debts undertaken for capital-intensive agriculture. In order to grow GM cotton-seed, small-holder peasant producers are locked in downward debt spirals to banks, money-lenders and kin. The devastating psycho-social effect of debt and suicide emerges from a structural impossibility inherent in peasant production, which could be called ‘cash-cropping without cash’. The book is concerned with how economic imperatives come to inhabit social and personal temporalities.

I am particularly concerned with understanding the specificity of neoliberal agrarian change as a process in which peasant producers around the world have become the subaltern franchisees of international bio-capital. In regions where agricultural production is subsumed by transgenic cash-cropping, the peasant household and village community have become productive corollaries of the capitalist market. This individuation of risk and the entry of market-debt into familial networks has had corrosive impacts on social relations and experiences of personhood. In central India, social relations between persons have realigned to accommodate the accumulation of cotton. I am invested in developing analytical frameworks that theorize and emplace gender and the peasant household as primary axes of socio-productive relations.

While my work is ethnographically located in South Asia, it engages broader debates on agrarian change that view agriculture not as vestigial but as central to the emergence of modern industrial capitalisms. I am the convener of a collaborative interdisciplinary project called ‘The Crops of Capital’ that explores global linkages between modern state power and rural socio-economic processes, particularly for the intensive capitalization, industrialization and hybridization of agriculture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

I have concurrent interests in the cultures and histories of South Asia, the social life of technology, the anthropology of religion, the history of anthropological thought, economic anthropology and bringing archives and ethnography together. I have previously published, and have ongoing research and teaching interests, in urban ethnography, cinematic, media and visual cultures.