Paper short abstract:

In this paper I will show how observing and describing the socio-political life of rice as a commodity in rural Tamil Nadu requires combining and contrasting both an actor-network and a meshwork perspective. I will further reflect on the implications of such an approach for ethnographic writing.

Paper long abstract:

Rice has been cultivated in Tamil Nadu for hundreds of years. In the last four decades, with the Green Revolution and economic liberalization, the flow of rice has changed dramatically and new networks involving complex sets of actors and power relations have formed, as rice cultivation and consumption have become deeply commoditized. Nowadays, almost the entire cultivated rice is sold to and processed by governmental and private corporations, while most cultivators purchase rice imported from various locations across India for consumption. In my research I follow rice through its cultivation, distribution, and consumption in and beyond a particular rice-cultivating village.

In this paper I will describe the actors and dynamics involved in enacting rice as a commodity both from an actor-network (Latour 2005) and a meshwork perspective (Ingold 2011). I will show that different actors alternate between embodied / relational and discursive / objectified ways of experiencing, imagining, and articulating the changing qualities and value of rice as it journeys through different networks and meshworks. I will further show how, when translating research experience into ethnographic description, I am faced with the same tension between enacting rice either as an enmeshed "thing" or a bounded "object" (Knappett 2011). I will argue that contrasting these two ways of describing and imagining rice opens up productive ways of critically reflecting on the socio-cultural and political-ecological processes that shape people's engagement with and perception of rice as well as on the socio-political process by which field experiences are abstracted into ethnographic description.