Paper short abstract:

Ethnographic accounts in India detail the contradictory temporal relationship between agro-industrialization and cow dung scarcity. This contribution discusses the gendered spatio-temporal implications of recent state efforts to commodify cow dung and move manuring labor from household to state.

Paper long abstract:

India has made a recent rhetorical turn towards promulgating chemical free "natural" farming as central to the political vision of a "self-reliant" India. Focused on agro-inputs produced from the waste of the Indigenous Indian bovine, there has been a rise of public and private commodification of cow dung as both a "raw" bioresource and also a value-added product (i.e., as farmyard manure or fermented soil inoculants). These efforts at commodification respond to longstanding village reports that depict cow dung scarcity as both the cause of modernizing agro forces (i.e., synthetic nitrogen, cooking gas) and also, somewhat contradictorily exacerbated by these technologies' widespread uptake. In addition to digging into the contradictory temporal relationship between cow dung scarcity and modernist technology, this contribution will examine some of the gendered and spatio-temporal implications of Indian state's efforts to procure "raw" cow-dung for cheap and process it into more potent agricultural inputs for profit. First I will consider the spatio-temporal contradictions of commodifying cow dung - an 'indigenous' resource - through looking to modernist, spatially gridded forms of cattle management in the eastern Indian plateau where open grazing has long dominated. Second, I will examine the role of the often unpaid reproductive labor historically needed to sustain cow dung economies, and theorize how labor may become valued differently when cow dung management moves from the household to state bureaucratic interest and control. I conclude by reflecting on the ways that global theories of justice might offer alternative valuations of cow dung and its management.