Glenn Stone

Agricultural change refers not just to the evolution of agricultural technology, but to patterns emerging from regular changes in what, where, and how farmers cultivate. Its importance goes beyond amounts produced, costs and profits, and environmental effects; agricultural change is closely linked to various societal institutions and to population. The two most influential works on agricultural change both focus on relationships between farming and population: Malthus saw farm production as a key factor limiting population, while Boserup saw population increase as a stimulant to increased production with higher input costs. Little research has supported Malthus; more has supported Boserup although her model now appears to be oversimplified, neglecting social, economic, ecological, and political factors that shape agricultural change.

In the Warangal district of Telangana, India, poor farmer knowledge, rapid seed turnover, and farmer conformist bias have resulted in faddish spikes in GM cotton seed popularity. We analyze space as a variable in 2715 seed choices by 136 farmers in two villages between 2004 and 2014, allowing us to model a decade of changes in farmers’ social learning across the village landscape. GIS analysis in combination with ethnographic research reveals shifting loci of seed certainty, in which different farmers were deemed worthy of emulation in different years. Over the study period, Warangal farmers were far more likely to emulate field neighbors’ cotton choices than they were to replant seeds, regardless of their crop yields. Rapid seed turnover and seed choice conformity was strongest among the comparatively poorer Scheduled Tribe farmers who live on the outskirts of the town proper. When the same farmers plant rice, their choices are more consistent through time and across space, suggesting that farmers learn about these two crops in very different ways.

A group of researchers and industry writers have constructed a narrative of technological triumph for Bt cotton in India, based on an empirical record of superior performance compared to conventional seed. Counterclaims of Bt cotton failure are attributed to mutually reinforcing interactions among non-governmental organisations which avoid rigorous comparisons. However, researchers and the biotechnology industry are also engaged in a similar authentication loop for generating, validating, and publicising such facts. With Bt cotton, the convention of routinely ignoring the effects of selection bias and cultivation bias benefits researchers, journals and the industry, but keeps us from drawing meaningful conclusions about the relative performance of the technology. But as poor as the case for isolating the technology impact of Bt cotton in India has been, it is useful in helping us understand the social conventions for creating one’s “own facts”.

A survey of anthropology projects on the web finds little overall evolution of the field’s scholarly products to capitalize on the medium’s potential. However, a few of the most recent innovations appear to provide a glimpse of changes soon to come. Several new forms of nonrefereed scholarship have appeared, and an important theme running through them is the blurring of conventional boundaries. Within the refereed literature, few journals have ventured beyond the delivery of facsimile journal pages in portable document format (PDF) files. An important exception is the just-published online version of Current Anthropology, which offers numerous enhancements possible only through the web.

Despite its use to exemplify how the world is “flat,” India is in many ways “spiky.” Hyderabad is a prosperous hub of information–communication technology (ICT) while its impoverished agricultural hinterland is best known for dysfunctional agriculture and farmer suicide. Based on the belief that a lack of knowledge and skill lay at the root of agrarian distress, the “e-Sagu” project aimed to leverage the city’s scientific expertise and ICT capability to aid cotton farmers. The project fit with a national surge of “last mile” projects bringing ICT to the village, but it was unique in using ICT to connect farmers directly with agricultural scientists acting as advisors. Such projects fit the interests of many actors, which has led to an unrealistic national enthusiasm about their impacts. This article uses the first five years of the project as a lens to view the cultural nature of both indigenous agricultural knowledge and “scientific” agricultural advising. Unlike lay publics whose ...

Anthropologists are increasingly returning from the field with digital images and other media, along with their field notes. This article lays out the “Web site model” for integrating digital images, audio, and other media files into unified field note documents through the use of a Web page editor. It explains how to generate multimedia galleries and link them within textual documents, to help restore the intuitive relationships between image, sound, and word that earlier technological limitations dissolved. This allows the ethnographer to review descriptions of particular events, interviews, or periods of participant observation with all the available forms of recording, as part of a single text, rather than artificially separating out the review process by medium.

By late in the twentieth century, scientists had succeeded in manipulating organisms at the genetic level, mainly by gene transfer. The major impact of this technology has been seen in the spread of genetically modified (GM) crops, which has occurred with little controversy in some areas and with fierce controversy elsewhere. GM crops raise a very wide range of questions, and I address three areas of particular interest for anthropology and its allied fields. First are the political-economic aspects of GM, which include patenting of life forms and new relationships among agriculture, industry, and the academy. Second is the wide diversity in response and resistance to the technology. Third is the much-debated question of GM crops for the developing world. This analysis is approached first by determining what controls research agendas and then by evaluating actual impacts of crops to date.

ABSTRACT Scholars in many disciplines have approached the question of how humans combine environmental learning (or empirical assessments) and social learning (or emulation) in choosing technologies. As both a consumer item and the subject of local indigenous knowledge, commercial crop seeds provide a valuable window into these processes. Previous research on seed choices by cotton farmers in Andhra Pradesh, India, uncovered short-term seed fads, or herding, indicating agricultural deskilling in which environmental learning had broken down. Unknown was if the faddism (and the underlying deskilling) would continue or even be exacerbated by the spread of genetically modified seeds. Data covering 11 years of seed choices in the same sample villages are now available; we combine analysis of this unusual data set with ethnographic observation. We find that herding has continued and intensified. We also find an unexpected emergent pattern of cyclical fads; these resemble classic models of successive innovation adoption where periodicity is introduced from outside the system, but we argue that it periodicity is actually generated by an internal dynamic.

Correspondence Glenn Davis Stone Email: stone@wustl.edu The Green Revolution continues to be a touchstone in debates on food production. Accounts generally cite “high‐yielding” dwarf wheat and rice spreading through Asia and particularly India, resulting in lives saved, agriculture modernised, and under‐utilised workers moved off farms. This Commentary examines the forces that popularised this version of events and then reviews a significant new body of writing, comprising five major works by historians. The new work provides a fundamental rethinking of many key aspects of the revolution, including the motivations behind it, the merits of the agricultural science in India that it displaced, whether the new seeds actually led to increased food production, and how concepts of desirable plants changed.

... 2 For a brief overview of genetic modification, tissue culture and marker-assisted breeding, see ...experiment, is the subject of a heated controversy, conducted without benefit of refereed scientific ... attempts to replace desi cottons with New World species, principally G. hirsutum. ...

I am grateful for the responses from Ronald Herring and N Chandra-sekhara Rao. I particularly enjoyed Herring's roast of postmodern anti-empiricists, since I have devoted several decades to painstaking empirical fi eld research on this complex thing called agriculture. But long-term commitment to empirical study obviously hones one's analytic view of the fl ood of data that comes out on the topic. My viewpoint, as evidenced in my 22 September 2012 EPW article, is that we have to evaluate each study on its own merits, including its research d esign, fi eld methods, analysis, and i nterpretation – the exact opposite of " levelling the epistemic fi eld " and writing off all facts as " modernist fi ction. " Herring need not be agitated by my willingness to critique peer-reviewed research, or fear that I am endangering the scientifi c enterprise by doing so. It is how science works. Such an analytic viewpoint is nowhere more important than for research in the hotly contested and often emotional arena of genetically modifi ed Bt cotton in India. Unlike some aspects of agriculture, the effects of the new seeds are notoriously diffi cult to isolate with confi dence, particularly because it is so tricky to create an empirical model of what hypothetically would have happened without Bt seeds (a " counter-factual "). Bt seeds were approved in 2002 and initially planted only by a few early adopters, then after a few years they were adopted rapidly and conventional seeds disappeared from the market. Rapid adoption is hardly a straightforward indicator of " success " – the reason cotton farmers were so desperate for new ways to kill insects was their equally rapid adoption of pesticide-intensive h ybrids a few years before (Stone 2011). But there had been only a very narrow window for comparing Bt seeds to counterfactuals, and even during that w indow, comparisons were confounded by biases in who planted the new seeds, how they cultivated the seeds, and by other developments in the rapidly-changing world of Indian cotton (Kranthi 2011). But the Indian cotton sector has been a key test case for GM crops, and so there has been a loud demand for clear and citable numbers on Bt's impact here. Given the polarisation on the topic, there is a particularly strong demand for numbers cutting through the complexities of the agricultural enterprise to show " success " …

... 2. Namu district farmstead settlement pattern and homeland village affiliation in the study area, Namu District, Plateau State. ... Netting, Robert McC. 1968 Hill farmers of Nigeria: cultural ecology of the Kofyar of the Jos Plateau. University of Washington Press, Seattle. ...

... Glenn Davis Stone * & Dominic Glover ... This strategy repeats an entrenched Malthusian account of food supply problems, in which specific food shortages are interpreted as evidence of a wider underlying problem of food scarcity caused by overpopulation (Lohmann 200523. ...

... 2. Namu district farmstead settlement pattern and homeland village affiliation in the study area, Namu District, Plateau State. ... Netting, Robert McC. 1968 Hill farmers of Nigeria: cultural ecology of the Kofyar of the Jos Plateau. University of Washington Press, Seattle. ...

ABSTRACT Despite the attempts to boil genetically modified (GM) crops down to simple narratives, the controversies that have swirled around these new technologies in different countries are in many ways strikingly different. In the United States, where farmers plant far more GM acres than anyone, disputes and controversies have been kept to surprisingly low levels (labeling initiatives and contaminations notwithstanding), but our two neighbors have both had major dust-ups. In Seeds, Science, and Struggle, sociologist Abby Kinchy shows how very different the issues, conflicts, and outcomes have been. The result is a book that is a valuable addition to the literatures on GM crops and on science studies. These literatures already include several multicountry comparisons of resistance to GM crops; Kinchy claims distinctiveness on the basis of her focus on farmers and rural communities and on her concern for how struggles over “genes out of place” unfolded differently in Mexico and Canada (p. 19). Actually, farmers and rural communities are not a strength of the book, but her account and analysis of the different sets of struggles is valuable, substantive, and well-delivered. We routinely hear the complaints that activists are politicizing deliberations that should be based purely on science. Kinchy argues that this is exactly backward: we are actually scientizing discussions that are really about what kind of agriculture we want to have and, at the end of the day, about the social order. The point is much larger than GM crops; since the 1950s, the role of science has switched from informing policy to defining policy (as STS scholar Brian Wynne has argued). Basing social policy and regulation primarily on science and technocratic decision-making frequently promotes industry’s interests, writes Kinchy; and rather than creating a neutral basis for decisions, scientization excludes less powerful actors and marginalizes their input. Kinchy looks carefully at how this scientizing occurs; at the surprising, often unpredictable, and rapidly changing role of science in GM struggles; and at the tensions and contradictions these cases leave us with. To organize the differences between the Mexican and Canadian cases, Kinchy focuses on the common denominator of genes out of place (from Mary Douglas’s famous definition of dirt). Both countries had famous cases of “out-of-place” genes: in Mexico, it was a claim of transgenes in traditional farmer varieties of corn; and in Canada, it was a claim of patented GM canola in a field whose owner had not bought the seed. These are not the only subjects examined in Mexico and Canada (for instance, there is a good account of the organic farmers’ attempt to sue Monsanto prospectively), but they feature prominently. Both claims led to epic, protracted conflicts entangled with national cultures, governance structures, international trade relationships, environmental treaties, intellectual property law, and global anti-GM mobilizations. At every step, contested constructions of science were pivotal. Mexican GM opponents made gains when they persuaded scientists to side with them (a process for which Kinchy uses the ungainly term epistemic boomerang); Monsanto prevailed when the Canadian court sided with its scientists over local knowledge. The organizing theme of “genes out of place” is an interesting and effective way to tie together the disparate cases, although it occasionally leads to some key issues being shortchanged. For instance, while it is true that activists were stirred by the presence of out-of-place transgenes in Mexican landrace corn, most of the heated criticism in the journals focused on another issue—whether the transgenes were unstably integrated, or if this was an artifact of Quist and Chapela’s use of inverse PCR (polymerase chain reaction). Kinchy’s careful account of the case of Percy Schmeiser (the Canadian farmer accused of patent infringement) is probably the best I have read. In this discussion, an interesting footnote would be that the whole reason that Monsanto had patents on the transgenes in the first place was that they had been put out of place: the legal rationale for the patentability of genes is that biotechnologists isolate them from their natural DNA home. Since they are out of place, they are no longer “natural” and therefore a patent-eligible invention. Glenn Davis Stone is a professor...

ABSTRACT In this essay we present three biases that make it difficult to represent farmer voices in a meaningful way. These biases are information bias, individual bias, and short-term bias. We illustrate these biases through two case studies. One is the case of Golden Rice in the Philippines and the other is the case of Bt cotton in India.