Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury, Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS), National University of Singapore. 

ABSTRACT

What is happening to peasants in the global south today? How are peasant labour processes being reconfigured by contemporary agrarian change? Are they exchanging their ploughs for picks? This seminar addresses this question and is based on recent scholarship that has problematized classical understandings of agrarian transition by going beyond the question of how capitalism transforms peasant-production systems to encompass broader sources of social and economic change in rural areas. Following this lead, I will show that throughout the global south, peasants, on mineral-rich tracts, are being driven into what are generally portrayed as illicit, and disruptive, mining practices by rising commodity prices, increasing input costs and poor returns from agriculture, authoritative resource governance by states that favour large corporations, and poor environmental care by these operators. The seminar is based on field research since 2003 primarily in coal, gold, marble and stone quarries in India supplemented by extended fieldwork in Lao PDR, Indonesia and Mongolia, and some African countries. My aim in exploring the political economy of extraction by peasants is to expand the notion of extractive industries, to dig through the contemporary sense of anxiety over such mining, and to extend the livelihoods diversification-versus-degrarianisation debate. More importantly, by distinguishing peasants mining from ‘peasant mining’, a category of mining, I am seeking to develop alternative theorisation of mineral-dependence to enable social scientists to shift away from the macroeconomic theory of resource curse or the top-down ‘greed and grievance’ view, and to to place the geophagous peasants within the body literature on agrarian change, by connecting the history of mining as a human endeavour with contemporary labour theories and the informal economy.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt received her BA and MA degrees in Geography from Calcutta University, and her PhD in Human Geography from the University of Burdwan. After teaching in an Indian University for several years, in 2002, she joined ANU where she is currently a Senior Research Fellow, researching natural resources through a feminist lens, and exploring the length and breadth of community issues in natural resource management. In particular, her research focuses on challenges around water and the extraction of minerals, and uses a mixed methodological approach that combines political ecology with political economy to holistically capture the intricate complexities at different geographical scales. It reflects the interdisciplinarity inherent in thinking about, and approaches, the resources as neither purely socially constructed nor out there but rather as coproduced by nature and society. Following her research on the ‘ungovernable chars’ (river islands) in the Bengal delta, she is now exploring (with funding from an Australian Research Council Discovery Project titled ‘Beyond the Resource Curse’), how the rural poor, experiencing agrarian and social changes, make a living on mineral-rich tracts. The specific geographical focus of the research is on India, but the project complements her explorations of the moral economy of mineral-dependent livelihoods in artisanal and informal mining in other countries, including Lao PDR and Indonesia (with funding from another Australian Research Council Linkage Project titled ‘Going for Gold’), and in Mongolia (as part of a current AusAID ADRAS grant titled ‘Supporting Women During the Mining boom in Mongolia’).

REGISTRATION

Admission is free. We would greatly appreciate if you RSVP Mr Jonathan Lee via email: jonathan.lee@nus.edu.sg