Standard Research Grant: An Ethnographic Study of Agrarian Life

Cornell University, Ithaca NY

Investigators

Abstract

This project is a study of applied agricultural science and settlement. To understand how applied agricultural science and settlement make land and people productive, the PI will collect data on agricultural extension and agrarian landscapes and livelihoods. Developed U.S. and European universities, agricultural extension has shaped livelihoods outside the U.S. and Europe in ways that deserve closer attention. The PI will study the work of governmental, university-based, and nongovernmental agricultural extension services aimed at small farmers in high altitude, landslide-prone landscapes. The PI will create a generalizable framework for understanding the political, economic, and environmental technologies that make such landscapes productive. This project will result in a detailed picture of how extension scientists and farmers work to make farmland viable in the context of environmental and economic change. The PI will develop a methodology for bringing history into conversation with ethnography to understand agrarian change. Archival documents on settlement and agricultural extension will be interpreted and shared with farmers in focus group workshops. This methodology will contribute to answering two questions: (1) In what ways is productivity enacted? Agricultural extension science has transformed both what farmers grow and how they grow it, and it aims to keep farming viable by introducing novel crops and tools. What requires further investigation is the active role small farmers have played in successive scientific efforts to craft productive landscapes, and how the promotion of particular crops is enmeshed in the larger project of securing control over challenging terrain, particularly mountain landscapes. (2) What are the effects of agricultural extension on everyday life for farmers? Successive agricultural extension projects have entailed both subtle and drastic changes to the lives of small farmers, particularly women. Understanding how domestic life, science, and the market intersect requires investigation of how settlement creates divisions of labor across scales. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.