Hanging by a Thread: Ecological Shifts, Agrarian Transformations, and Labor in Northeast India’s Silk Plantations

Abstract

The paper is based on my doctoral dissertation that is in progress. The dissertation is based on two years (2022-2024) of ethnographic research in Upper Assam and archival research to observe the faultlines in a scaling-up model that is negotiated by agrarian communities and become locally embedded – even if fragmented – to construct claims to a ‘climate crisis management.’ The co-existence of settled and swidden farming and attendant land rights of indigenous communities in these regions has been transforming since the colonial periods, along with far-reaching transformations in the forest tracts through resource extraction regimes— oil and tea primarily (Karlsson, 2012). In this context, I ask, how do agrarian communities and an entrepreneurially driven class negotiate projects of scalability in the context of ecological uncertainty? What happens to the shifting value of a commodity in circulation that is itself being transformed due to shifting land and environmental relations?