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Dualisms shaping human-nature relations: discovering the multiple meanings of social-ecological change in Wayanad

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Abstract

This paper reflects on the impacts of agrarian change and social reorganisation on gender-nature relations through the lens of an indigenous group named the Kuruma in South India. Building upon recent work of feminist political ecology, I uncover a number of dualisms attached to the gender-nature nexus and put forward that gender roles are constituted by social relations which need to be analysed with regard to the transformative potential of gender-nature relations. Three main themes are at the centre of the empirical inquiry: gender subjectivities, rural off-farm employment and the human-nature nexus. I seek to show that, first, the production of gendered subjectivities cannot be simplified through essentialist assumptions that romanticise women’s relationships with nature; second, off-farm employment strategies both reinforce the social hierarchy in gender and contradict the Kuruma’s moral economies; and, finally, environmental and agrarian change redefine the use of agrobiodiversity and are related to ideas on progressive versus nonprogressive cultivation practices. The research is informed by qualitative research methods and offers a conceptual approach to the deconstruction of gender-nature relations from a poststructuralist feminist perspective.

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Notes

  1. Muenster’s (2012) ethnographic study on the political ecology of farmer suicides in the agrarian district of Wayanad reveals that they are linked to two trends: firstly, to specific practices of cash crop farming and to the regional history of the political–ecological crisis and, secondly, to biographies of migration, personal aspirations, choking debts, problematic family relations and possibly to diseases and alcoholism.

  2. My fieldwork from 2010 to 2012 has revealed that is usually Kuruma men who own and inherit agricultural land. Once a woman is married, she usually uses her husband’s fields for cultivation. Meanwhile, unmarried women work on the fields of their parents or extended family members.

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  1. Chair of Comparative Development and Cultural Studies - Southeast Asia, University of Passau, Goethestrasse 24, 40764, Langenfeld, Germany

    Isabelle Kunze

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  1. Isabelle Kunze
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Kunze, I. Dualisms shaping human-nature relations: discovering the multiple meanings of social-ecological change in Wayanad. Agric Hum Values 34, 983–994 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-016-9760-x

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