Shifting production/shifting consumption: A political ecology of health perceptions in Kumaon,India |
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| Institution: | 1. Department of Anthropology, 354 Mansfield Rd., Unit 1176, University of Connecticut, CT 06269, USA;2. Institute of Archaeology, University of Jordan, Amman 28170, Jordan;3. Department of Anthropology, Penn Museum, University of Pennsylvania, 3260 South St., Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA;1. Department of Political Science, University of Vienna, Universitätsstraße 7, A-1010 Vienna, Austria;2. Institute of Social Ecology (SEC), Alpen-Adria University Klagenfurt-Graz-Wien, Schottenfeldgasse 29, A-1070 Vienna, Austria;1. ICAR Research Complex for Eastern Region, Patna, 800 014, Bihar, India;2. Department of Agronomy, Institute of Agricultural Sciences, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, 221 005, Uttar Pradesh, India;3. Carbon Management and Sequestration Centre, The Ohio State University, Columbus, 43210, USA;4. ICAR Mahatma Gandhi Integrated Farming Research Institute, Motihari, 845429, Bihar, India |
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| Abstract: | Despite rapid economic growth, India has not seen the improvements in food and nutritional security that other developing countries have had. This “Asian enigma” has generated a wealth of economistic analyses seeking to explain the persistence of poor nutrition, yet few studies have looked at everyday experiences of changing food systems, and how this impacts nutritional practices as well as the processes of subject formation. In this paper, I draw on qualitative research conducted in Uttarakhand, North India and examine how state-led shifts in agricultural production have resulted in changing food consumption practices and diminished perceptions of health. Villagers link this decreased health to increased chemicals in home-produced food, greater dependence on the market for food purchases, and generational changes in dietary preferences. Despite villagers’ cognizance of the negative health effects of these practices, they largely view these byproducts of capitalistic development with an air of inevitability. Following Mansfield (2011) this paper contributes to the political ecology of health literature by employing the concept of food as a “vector of intercorporeality” (Stassart and Whatmore, 2003:449) and bringing this into conversation with a poststructuralist understanding of subjectivity. I argue that within shifting landscapes of agriculture production and food consumption, notions of diminished health are indicative of the complex and always incomplete processes of subject formation. I view shifting health perceptions as intimate bodily resistances to agricultural development, and conclude that within agricultural development programs a focus on bodily health and well-being is a fecund platform for further experimental research that seeks to imagine development differently. |
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| Keywords: | Political ecology of health Subjectivity Desire Consumption Corporeality Agriculture Food security |
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