From Cultural to Economical: Agrarian Modernity and the Changing Meaning of Agriculture

In postcolonial agrarian modernity and development, the local ‘work of nature’ is continuously monitored by the external epistemology of scientific agrarianism, where agrarian subjectivity is produced and reproduced through science, technology and the market. Against this background, this research article explored the field view of the contemporary nature of ‘agriculture as performance’ through an ethnographic study in a dryland village in Bolangir district of Odisha. The article concludes that the modernisation and commercialisation of agriculture have reshaped agrarian subjectivity in the direction of market ethics, land use patterns and the individuation of farming households from their traditional collective ties.