This dissertation examines the social and material life of uncertainty in rural India. Specifically, I examine how cultivators apprehend, manage, and capitalize on the endemic and emerging risks of agriculture in villages of central India. While farmers have always been exposed to the vagaries of climate and market, the emerging uncertainties of anthropogenic climate change and liberalized agri-commodity trade have transformed agriculture into a gamble on the monsoon and the market. Theorizing agriculture as an increasingly speculative enterprise, this dissertation outlines the material and imaginative work this entails, its differentiation across key axes of social inequality, and entanglements with kinship and ritual, patronage and policy, and hierarchy and obligation. Rather than view agriculture through an undifferentiated lens of crisis, decline and nostalgia, this dissertation foregrounds the ways that cultivators forge uneven futures within a changing rural landscape.��

This question of how agrarian risk is shaped by broader political-economic, cultural and environmental processes is grounded in an ethnographic study of everyday agricultural decisions and practices in Malwa, a predominantly agricultural region in western Madhya Pradesh, which has witnessed rapid agrarian transformations over the last two decades. The region’s agricultural growth has been significant, particularly through the cultivation of high-risk, high-value horticultural crops. At the same time, the state government has also been at the forefront of adopting and implementing policies of risk-management, from yield-index insurance to price-support schemes. Against this backdrop, I trace the emergence of moral and political economies of risk and responsibility across five key sites: the monsoon rain, insurance claims, market speculation, groundwater extraction, and caste distinction.

I argue that ideologies of risk have become deeply entrenched in the countryside, tied to legacies of the Green Revolution technology, neoliberal agricultural and an emerging ethic of entrepreneurialism. Across these sites, I show how farmers deploy both religious and secular vocabularies of risk, fate, and destiny to apprehend uncertainty, grapple with the past, and act on the future. Ultimately, I demonstrate how state policies that aim to manage risk actually exacerbate uncertainties and heighten existing inequalities in the countryside, even as they offer novel spaces for capital accumulation, social mobility and political claim-making in the countryside.�

Over the last few decades, in many parts of the world, from Mali to Peru, Mozambique to Sri Lanka, Uganda to India, Information and Communication technologies (ICTs) have been employed to foster ‘transparent’, ‘accountable’ and ‘effective’ public bureaucracies. This dissertation asks what do ICTs do even when they do not meet these putative goals? How is the internal infrastructure of governments changing as ICTs encounter the material facets of public bureaucracies? The dissertation employs an interdisciplinary methodological approach, marrying ethnography of bureaucratic offices in southern India and archival research of prior programs to technologize public governance in India. It studies what new people, objects and institutions emerge as the materiality of public bureaucracy, historically predicated on paper, is being increasingly supplemented and transformed by new digital media, such as databases, mobile apps and web dashboards, and the political effects of their mediation on bureaucratic power and knowledge.

Under the over-arching theoretical frame of techno-politics, this dissertation argues that the digitization of public bureaucracies point not just to the possibilities of improved governance but also its risks, as vulnerabilities and breakdowns in the digital system weaken the “iron cage” of bureaucracy and shift the responsibility of repairing digital records onto individuals. Second, this dissertation makes a call for taking seriously a hybridity of media forms, not simply as a transitory phase before a more stable media sets in, but as the material condition of the state after liberalization. ICTs do not simply dislodge paper documents, but paper seems to be undergoing some change as it encounters, articulates, effaces or is effaced by ICTs. Third, querying the relation between “the technical” as an assemblage of new technologies, people and processes and “the bureaucratic”, this dissertation points to the material and discursive work undertaken to maintain the ever-shifting boundaries between the two, arguing that many expert practices are subsumed under an existing bureaucratic logic of authority and hierarchy. The dissertation concludes by pointing to how these arguments can be brought to bear on the dramatic surge of the digital during the Covid pandemic.

This dissertation is about the reconfiguration of the export garment industry from the perspective of its nearly 300,000 workers in Sri Lanka. Since 1977, Sri Lanka’s economy has liberalized, which involves the ongoing privatization of State Owned Enterprises (SOEs), cuts to universal welfare, and an emphasis on attracting foreign investment. The state has created thirteen Export Processing Zone (EPZs), mostly along the southwestern coast, to provide opportunities for investors, including tax concessions. Suppliers, especially Sri Lankan-owned Multinational Corporations (MNCs), have consolidated into enterprises worth hundreds of millions of dollars that benefit from tax and trade policy. In addition, Sri Lanka’s continued integration into the global market has led to further cuts to public services, including declining government revenue as a proportion of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Because other small Southern countries attempting to industrialize face similar challenges, I group these changes under the rubric of export capitalism.

To analyze the impact of export capitalism, I produce an ethnographic account of Sri Lankan export garment workers’ lives. I completed ethnographic research among workers, managers, unionists, residents living near EPZs, government officials, and others, over a 26-month period, from July 2014 to December 2016. I track people’s routines, movements, and critiques across a range of sites, including rural villages, factories inside and outside EPZs, boarding houses near the Katunayake EPZ, located north of the capital Colombo, and union offices. I argue that export garment workers embody the tension between their twin identities as workers—narrowly-defined economic agents receiving a wage—and members of the working class—a broad political constituency. Export garment workers experience wage repression and the intensification of work in vertically-integrated enterprises, including those owned by Sri Lankan MNCs. They also critique the retreat of public services, demanding more from the Sri Lankan welfare state.

Interpreting workers’ experiences, I concentrate on the unrealized demands implied by the appropriation of the value that they produce. These demands are not realized either in their wages or the public services that they receive. I argue that workers attempt to manage constraints by relying on each other. Tensions within community, in places such as the boarding houses and villages in which many workers live, in turn reproduce the contradictions of export capitalism. I conclude my dissertation by looking at the ways in which unionists on the ground attempt to recruit workers. The question—as implied by a rapidly expanding literature on the practice of unionism in the global South—is how Sri Lanka’s labor movement is being reshaped by a labor force, often gendered as female, that works in export industries such as garments. Accordingly, my dissertation approaches theoretical debate about the representation of the working class from the ethnographic perspective of the challenges faced by Sri Lanka’s export garment workers.

Artisanal crafted goods like beer, cheese or textiles signify sustainable, local, and handmade production in global markets. Constituting alternatives to mass culture and mass production, these goods allow producers and consumers to see themselves as engaging ethical and authentic ways of living in our contemporary world. Looking at how artisanal products are designed and made in Kachchh, India, my dissertation explores how traditional artisans use intellectual property certifications, design and entrepreneurship to expand markets for their traditional crafts. Looking at the implementation of trade-not-aid development strategies and the increased use of design training programs that are targeted toward traditional artisans in India, this dissertation research looks at design as a political category important for understanding the stakes of ethical and authentic living in our contemporary world. Kachchh is renowned for its craft traditions of weaving, block printing, embroidery, leatherwork and pottery that are still practiced as a primary means of livelihood by many Kachchhi artisan communities. Ranging from high design to tourist trinkets, Kachchhi artisanal production circulates in both high and low-end artisanal markets. In a country where 25% of the rural population is poor, traditional artisanal production becomes an important site of rural economic revitalization. In India, artisanal production is the second largest contributor to the rural economy, after agriculture. The urgency for economic inclusion also stems from the historic social exclusion traditional artisan communities have faced, comprising as they do minorities, listed as Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, in the Indian census. In global artisanal markets, traditional artisans are expected to be entrepreneurs and leverage their social and historical marginality to expand markets for a community craft. Looking at shifts in craft technologies, trade-not-aid marketing strategies and collaborations between artisans and designers, I look at how artisanal production relates to industrial production and how it is entangled with global capitalism.

This dissertation considers how, and whose, everyday practices of digital media use have turned into the “creator economy”, the $100-billion global industry of digital content creation that is often touted as a paradigm shift in the “future of work”. It follows ethnographically an unlikely set of creators — dominant-caste Hindu, Indian women, self-styled “home chefs” — who make home-cooking content for YouTube and Instagram. I argue that the creator economy is best understood as the expansion of the household industry, reconfigured in this conjuncture as the household start-up. In such a framing, the historical, sociopolitical, infrastructural and affective constitution of households is as central to the accumulative apparatus of the creator economy as apps, smart devices, algorithms, web traffic, practices of individual self-making and the intentions of tech companies. In content and method, Home Chefs argues for a broadening of the presumed sites, practices and socialities through which the mutual imbrication of digital media and capitalism can be understood. In doing so, it models an ethnographic insistence on materiality, place, affect and embodiment in studies of the digital. It de-centers technologically deterministic and universalizing theorizations about the ‘effects’ of social media and platform economies on labor and social life, and provides a non-Western genealogy of the existing structural conditions that are constituting digital capitalism as a set of uneven, contradictory global exchanges. In making food its object of inquiry, it foregrounds as central to these projects the intersecting relationships between gender, race, sexuality and caste in the global emergence of neoliberalism and xenophobic nationalism. In re-centering the household, homes and homeworkers as the primary producers of a global industry, it highlights the intimate social arrangements that are central to producing capitalism, and challenges the notion of a priori capitalist ‘logics’. Taking capitalism to be a project, not a context, my chapters address the questions: How is the abstract capitalist project of the creator economy materialized in particular places by particular people? What work goes into making it tangible and powerful? What kinds of actors, infrastructures, social structures and cultural processes are pressed into service, moulded, and reorganized in the process of its actualization?

This MA project consists of: 1) a review of the literature on the study of food and restaurants within anthropology, as well as in the social sciences more broadly, and 2) a collection of preliminary observations regarding the transformations taking place within Los Angeles’s restaurant industry due to COVID-19. Rather than attempt to cover the entire breadth of the anthropology of food, I primarily consider works that focus on the symbolic capacities of food as they relate to various dimensions of identity, the senses, and memory. Afterwards, I consider works that explore the ways in which these themes are refracted through and within restaurant spaces. Using these bodies of literature as an intellectual foundation, I conclude by posing a series of questions pertaining to the ongoing transformation of the restaurant in Los Angeles, which I plan to selectively take up and explore during future dissertation research.