Scalability, Commodity Liveliness, and Difference: Recent Transformations in South Asian Economies, Environments, and Politics 

What is lost or gained as commodities move from the scale of the artisanal to the industrial, the marginal to the national? This panel follows Anna Tsing’s (2012) attention to scalability and the later identification of a Plantationocene (Haraway 2015) as an era defined by the “remarkable speed and scale” of industrial agricultural and food production (Barua, Martin, Achtnich 2023). The discussants in this panel focus on commodity chains that are associated with minority difference and marginality, but are deeply significant to the workings of nation-making. We look at how the scaling-up of commodity production due to state policy, local politics, international development, and community resistance transforms agrarian and urban environments, land, sea, and river-scapes (Ludden 1999). We explore how changes to traditional and modern agrarian orders (also including their effects on forestry, fishing, and hunting for example) eventually spill over into the realm of the political. We are particularly interested in commodities that are or were once living: animals, plants, and their byproducts. This liveliness is significant as we consider these commodities possessive of their own unexpected agencies, decisive with the demands of their consumers or the labors of their suppliers. We read the scaling-up of these economies alongside movements of majoritarianism, as a drive towards the death of difference, the destruction of multi-species lives and landscapes, and the attempt to make the natural mirror the industrial. 

For this year’s Annual Conference on South Asia, Madison (October 30 - November 2 2024), we are putting together a panel and thus, invite panelists who think along similar lines of inquiry particularly studying agriculture and natural resource harvest. The idea is to expand on nascent thoughts and common concerns to create shared modes of knowledge. This would be particularly generative for those of us who are in various stages of developing ideas and proposals, and writing up dissertations. 

Submissions (200-250 words abstract) will be accepted through April 1st. Please send them to anabelle_suitor@brown.edu and/or radhika_moral@brown.edu. 

Works Cited: 

Tsing, Anna. 2012. “On Nonscalability: The Living World Is Not Amenable to Precision-Nested Scales,” Common Knowledge 18:3 pp. 505-524.

Haraway, Donna.  2015. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” Environmental Humanities: 6. pp. 159-165. 

Barua, Maan, Rebeca Ibáñez Martín, and Marthe Achtnich. 2023, January 24. “Introduction: Plantationocene.” Society for Cultural Anthropology, link: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/introduction-plantationocene. 

Ludden, David E. 1999. An Agrarian History of South Asia. Cambridge University Press.