Paper short abstract:

An examination of a substantial range of data 1950-2013 on patterns of work, land holding and inter-village relations.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I will present quantitative and qualitative material collected during twelve months of fieldwork in a rural village in the Malwa, Madhya Pradesh. My focus will be on changing patterns of work, land ownership and intra-village forms of collaboration and dependence. The research is part of a larger project within which I had the opportunity to collaborate with the anthropologist Adrian C. Mayer. Mayer studied the same village in the 1950s and has returned regularly ever since. He has granted me access to his field notes and census materials and visited me in the field. Together, the materials allow me to present a longitudinal account of agrarian relations over six decades. The changing meaning of categories such as urban, suburban, peri-urban and rural are of particular interest to me. I assess the heuristic value of these terms as conceptual tools for our understanding of contemporary social and economic dynamics within the village-city continuum.