Short Abstract

The workshop proposes social reproduction as an analytical lens to explore the forces, desires and practices that ‘move’ smallholders across the Global South in a time of rural-urban migration, ecological crises, and accelerated agrarian change.

Long Abstract

Smallholders of the Global South constituted an extensive field of anthropological inquiry between the 1960s and 80s, resulting in much-debated studies of rural life and political economy (e.g., Geertz 1963; Scott 1976; Wolf 1969). In the last decades, the anthropological focus gradually shifted to plantations, gigantic schemes for dispossession and global supply chains (e.g., Li and Semedi 2021; Tsing 2005).

In line with reemerging interest in small-scale agriculture in the 21st century and its contemporary challenges (Edelman 2024), this workshop aims to reinvigorate anthropological attention on smallholder lived realities in the Global South. Moving beyond abstract approaches that centre structural factors or culturalist approaches that presume a harmonious ‘peasant way of life’, we seek to ethnographically explore agrarian livelihoods that are shaped by a broad set of dynamics under contemporary capitalism, effecting shifts to contract farming, plurality of incomes, increased mobility, land scarcity, environmental degradation, as well as gendered hopes and fears about the future. We see all these changes as part of or responses to increasing difficulties of social reproduction among smallholder farmers in the Global South (Mezzadri et al. 2024).

Thinking with social reproduction throws a spotlight on how a range of political economic processes play out in everyday farming pursuits and how smallholders experience and respond to them. We invite contributions that think through social reproduction within and beyond rural households to open new avenues to consider classic themes of agrarian life: the land question; mobility, urbanisation, and diversification of incomes; and exacerbating ecological crises.