From Analysing 'Filières Vivrieres' to Understanding Capital and Petty Production in Rural South India

Agricultural markets are a prime object of what the anthropologist Clifford Geertz called ‘theoretical diffusion’ (Geertz 1973). In this diffused context, Henry Bernstein used an approach developed by French scholars, ‘filières vivrieres’, to analyse the ethnicized concentration of capital in South...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of agrarian change Vol. 16; no. 3; pp. 478 - 500
Main Author Harriss-White, Barbara
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Oxford Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.07.2016
Subjects
Accumulation
Agrarian society
Agricultural commodities
Agricultural development
Agricultural economics
Agricultural production
Agricultural research
Agriculture
Capitalism
commercial capital
commodity studies
Corn
Differentiation
filières
Geertz, Clifford (1926-2006)
India
Intellectuals
Marketing
Markets
Modes of production
petty production
Production
Regulation
Rice
Rice fields
Rural areas
Social classes
Studies
Trade
Zea mays
India
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Summary:Agricultural markets are a prime object of what the anthropologist Clifford Geertz called ‘theoretical diffusion’ (Geertz 1973). In this diffused context, Henry Bernstein used an approach developed by French scholars, ‘filières vivrieres’, to analyse the ethnicized concentration of capital in South African maize markets (Bernstein 1996). The first part of this essay critically introduces the background to this approach, and Bernstein's development of it, to examine capital accumulation and public and private regulation. The second part merges insights from filières with a systems approach to post‐harvest activity. It revisits four decades of research on South Indian agriculture and its paddy‐rice markets to show how petty production and trade can coexist with capitalist accumulation, showing how, to what extent and why the relations of agricultural commodity marketing ‘fail to complete’ the process of polar class differentiation and consolidate petty commodity production in the post‐harvest sphere of circulation – the filière – as well as in production.
Bibliography:istex:ECD73E0C4600855FBBC3A5B147FF2CCD96A56ABA
ark:/67375/WNG-KG8KHDV1-N
DFID-ESRC
ArticleID:JOAC12178
During the four decades, many people have helped with this project of fieldwork. Over and above the acknowledgements in the references, the fieldwork over the period 2012–16 was aided and abetted by Gilbert Rodrigo, partly under the ‘labourist supply‐chain’ component of the DFID‐ESRC funded project: ‘Resources, Greenhouse Gases, Technology and Jobs in India's Informal Economy: The Case of Rice’. I want to record my gratitude to DFID–ESRC, to GR, to the exceptional comments of two JAC reviewers, to Liam Campling and Jens Lerche, and to Colin Leys and Ali Jan, who responded to a revised draft. The usual disclaimers apply.
ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-2
content type line 23
ISSN:1471-0358
1471-0366
DOI:10.1111/joac.12178