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• W4379804787 abstract "Seeding DebtAlchemy, Death, and the Precarious Farming of Life-Finance in the Global South Geeta Patel (bio) Village residents had spoken about Bt cotton in glowing terms, describing how it had changed lives and enabled people to build houses and buy gold. —Farmer in a Bt cotton promotional video (Pallavi) Bt cotton: it changes lives and enables. Enabling is shaped around two verbs and two objects. Building and buying, houses and gold. And the temporality of the verbs appears to guarantee their authenticity. The events were located in the past, so they might actually have happened; and what had happened in the past was a mandate on the future of those who spoke. Village residents in this sentence speak on behalf of Bt cotton; they become the spokespeople for its auratic possibilities, what it will bring with it. What is Bt cotton? Bt cotton, which I describe more fully in the section entitled “Returning to Bt Cotton,” is a transgenic seed. The genes put into the cotton plant supposedly render it resistant to boll-worm, a “pest” that bores into the seedpod to feed on cotton fibers. Some imagine that Bt cotton generates a larger yield, and hence greater profits and an augmented, shinier life for small farmers (Kathage and Qaim).1 But the glow that emanates from this cotton is not about cotton itself, it is not directed merely toward and therefore through seeds that the cotton plant generates again. The glow is not produced through some invocation of cotton as a natural good, as a living thing, not even manufactured through “raw” cotton substantiated as a commodity to enter markets. Nor is it produced through what cotton would [End Page 1] eventually become: another commodity, such as cloth. Instead, the effulgence is directed back toward the farmers. What this cotton brings is something shiny to the people who cultivate it.2 It enables those people access to something they are assumed not to have the proper sort of—houses and gold.3 Both of these things register a particular way for South Asians especially in the contemporary context. Unlike mere money, such as rupee notes and paper currency, which can fail its valuations, houses and gold are objects that hold their value: they are lasting goods—“durables,” in South Asian pseudo-economic parlance. It is almost as though cycles of exchange that are at the heart of capitalism get short-circuited into concrete value. And the “and” that links “changes lives” with “enables” transfers the value accrued by the enabled durables back toward lives or forward from lives changed toward what might change them, what might be enabled. Value stopped in its tracks in this way is value reaching its apogee, and it leaves a residue. Those whose lives have been changed can now stop seeking chances to change. Future assured, they can safely stop hoeing endlessly for value. Priti Ramamurthy’s work on Dalit small holders “newly incorporated in the cotton seed commodity chain” points to something I will bring up again later on in this essay: what cotton carries as an “aspirational crop” “sown with dreams of prosperity” (Ramamurthy, 1035). Cotton that has had a long history in Marxist analyses becomes a natural good, its value exceeding the bounds of its materiality. But as material, it also has a life span dogged by the possibilities of death and failure. As a commodity imbued with volatility, it can then suddenly transform lives, as though by magic, through durables; something that might consume itself then lives on as solid objects. Collateralizing the small sentence with which I have opened this essay, then, are also a host of other allegorical comestibles that furnish the larder of precarity: the short seasonal temporalities of crop raising carried over into many repeated cycles of sowing and reaping, the frailty of rural lives, and the fragility of small-scale village livelihoods. These foreshortened temporalities and tentative lives bring more into their ambit than what is often offered under the title “precarity”: dying and living, hope and fantasy, depletion and enervation. Now, many readers might wonder at my extended poeticized riff on a fairly short sentence extracted from a much longer article. A..." @default.
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• W4379804787 date "2015-12-01" @default.
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• W4379804787 title "Seeding Debt: Alchemy, Death, and the Precarious Farming of Life-Finance in the Global South" @default.
• W4379804787 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2015.a581272" @default.
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