Experimental practice in the ruins of the Green Revolution: commoning with/in a water-scarce field

Abstract

This article considers water scarcity as an expression of agrarian crisis in South India. It explores how the drought affects the everyday life of communities in the area of Kadavur, limiting their possibilities to choose what crops they can grow, what food they may eat, and what futures they will cultivate. Moreover, it draws from the framework of experimental practice proposed by Papadopoulos in order to understand how more-than-social movements engage in material organizing to transform their condition. In the first part, it constructs the biofinancialization of organic millet, in relation to the making of cheap rice. Hence, it presents an ethnography of alterontological politics through enhanced care and tinkering with food. Moreover, the article explores the role of water management technology in the troubled ecology of the drought. Finally, by discussing an ethnography of borewell repair, it sheds light on the odd entanglements between a global technology and this situated ecology. This brings the fieldworker into the picture and considers the emergent politics of communing with/in the field.