Grace M. Carswell

Farmers and fallowing: agricultural change in Kigezi District, Uganda

Focusing on the area of Kigezi, in south-western Uganda, this article examines land use change over a 50-year period. It shows that Kigezi, an area long considered to be suffering the effects of overpopulation, has never suffered the environmental catastrophes that have long been predicted. Instead, research suggests that farmers have successfully managed their land and maintained productivity.

From field to factory: tracing transformations in bonded labour in the Tiruppur region, Tamil Nadu

Abstract Taking a historical perspective, this paper explores the phasing out of ‘bonded’ labour in agriculture and its reappearance in the village-based power-loom industry in the Tiruppur region of Tamil Nadu, India. Focusing on a village outside Tiruppur, we trace the gradual transformation and ultimate disappearance of forms of labour bondage in agriculture. In this region bondedness in agriculture changed in a number of significant ways, before giving way by about the 1970s to primarily casual and contract-based labour arrangements. Around the same time, small-scale power-loom workshops, which are highly labour intensive and increasingly dependent on migrant labour, began to mushroom in the village, leading to the reintroduction of bonded labour, but this time in the context of rural industrial employment. We explore how debt bondage was introduced and how it affects the working lives of both migrants and non-migrants. The paper examines the differences and similarities between past agricultural and current industrial labour bondage, and how it is experienced and talked about by both employers and workers.

Continuities in environmental narratives: the case of Kabale, Uganda, 1930-2000

This article looks at continuities and change around the issue of agricultural sustainability in colonial and post-colonial Kabale. It argues that a series of environmental narratives developed during the colonial period, which have been largely unquestioned since then. It shows how the perception of the district being threatened with environmental degradation has continued from the earliest colonial period up to the present day. Many of the assumptions made by colonial officials remain unquestioned, and with few exceptions the policy rhetoric remains unaltered in the post-colonial period. It argues that recent evidence suggests that these assumptions need to be seriously questioned.

T-shirts and tumblers Caste, dependency and work under neoliberalisation in south India

This article explores the variegated nature of processes of neoliberalisation and their diverse impacts on relations of caste and dependency in rural India. Focusing on the rural hinterland of Tiruppur, a major industrial cluster in Tamil Nadu, south India, the article examines the ways in which neoliberal regimes insert themselves in the region and combine, coexist or clash with existing institutional regimes of power. It documents the highly differentiated and unpredictable effects neoliberalisation has on the lives of villagers who have become directly or indirectly engulfed by its processes, paying particular attention to the uneven impacts on local landscapes of capitalist production and on rural relations of caste and dependency. The article examines rural transformations through the contrasting experiences of Dalits in two villages that became connected to the Tiruppur industry. While in one village, Dalits gained access to the urban industry, in the other, they remained disconnected from urban garment jobs due to persistent relations of debt bondage and unfree labour. It is argued that processes of industrial neoliberalisation do not lead to linear transformations in caste relations and social inequalities. Rather, the relevance and meaning of caste are transformed in uneven, and often even contrasting ways, depending on how particular localities are integrated into wider institutional regimes of power and rule. Processes of neoliberalisation unleash powerful encounters between old structures of power and new regimes of rule, and generate new configurations that defy prediction and expectation.

NREGA and the Return of Identity Politics in Western Tamil Nadu, India

In her piece, Pamela Price raises a number of fascinating questions about the possibility of a major shift in electoral politics in India which deserves further analytical attention and empirical observation. The thesis that electoral politics is being reshaped by development agendas and performance targets rather than being driven by a politics of identity and patron-clientelism is thought-provoking.

Food Crops as Cash Crops: The Case of Colonial Kigezi, Uganda

This article examines the case of Kigezi, where colonial efforts to introduce cash crops such as coffee and tobacco consistently failed. It argues that Kigezi farmers already had cash-earning crops, which were food crops. These were widely produced and traded in the pre-colonial and colonial periods, and the strength and vibrancy of this trade helps to explain the problems the colonial state encountered when it tried to introduce cash crops. Marketing policies introduced by the colonial state for different cash crops in Kigezi served only to discourage cash-crop production there, in contrast to food production.

Waiting for the state: gender, citizenship and everyday encounters with bureaucracy in India

This article focuses on practices and meanings of time and waiting experienced by poor, low-class Dalits and Muslims in their routine encounters with the state in India. Drawing on ethnographic research from Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh, it presents experiences of waiting around queuing and applying for paperwork, cards, and welfare schemes, in order to examine the role of temporal processes in the production of citizenship and citizen agency. An analysis of various forms of waiting – ‘on the day’, ‘to and fro’, and ‘chronic’ waiting – reveals how temporal processes operate as mechanisms of power and control through which state actors and other mediators produce differentiated forms of citizenship and citizens. Temporal processes and their material outcomes, we argue, are shaped by class, caste and religion, while also drawing on – and reproducing – gendered identities and inequalities. However, rather than being ‘passive’ patients of the state, we show how ordinary people draw on money, patronage networks and various performative acts in an attempt to secure their rights as citizens of India.