Locating the Farmer: Ideologies of Agricultural Labor in Bihar, India

Abstract

Ethnographic fieldwork in Bihar, India, reveals paradoxes at the core of contemporary agriculture. Rural people view growing their own food as a crucial bulwark against the vicissitudes of the market but prioritize off-farm employment to meet rising household expenses. Landowners who cultivate crops often refer to themselves as unemployed while complaining about a lack of laborers to work the land. They do not always refer to themselves as farmers, while many people who do not call themselves farmers nevertheless perform farm work and rely on agriculture as a livelihood. These paradoxes point to the fuzziness and incoherence surrounding the term “farmer” as both an identity and analytical concept. Ideologies of agricultural labor are shaped by different subject positions and social categories, such as caste, gender, and age. The fractured, fluid, and contingent nature of agriculture, in which people move between different locations and identities, provides the grounds for problematizing scholarly categories of agricultural labor—categories like farmer, landlord, peasant, sharecropper, and laborer. The on-the-ground realities of agriculture necessitate reframing the conceptual language to attend to the specificity and materiality of labor in particular sites and moments while also foregrounding the ambivalence, vulnerability, and incompleteness that inheres in agricultural labor.