Search

Summary Income diversification continues to be a key strategy for poor rural households, including those that are progressively developing and those operating under increasing distress. The ability of a household to diversify has been shown to depend upon its demographic and economic characteristics and its physical and social context. This paper considers the effects of intra-village social networks on household income diversification in one of the poorest and most ethnically diverse areas of the Indian state of Kerala. Using techniques adapted from spatial econometrics, we find that social connections within a village magnify the impacts of household characteristics such as education and number of adults by a factor of 3.6 times. Models with alternative measures of network centrality (degree and eigenvector) indicate that the number of network connections that a household has is more important than the centrality of those connections. Finally, we use social contact information to calculate assortative mixing based on caste. The results suggest social stratification in these villages, with higher levels of stratification associated with lower levels of income diversification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that Indian farmers’ suicides may fruitfully be described as public deaths. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the South Indian district of Wayanad (Kerala), it shows that farmers’ suicides become ‘public deaths’ only via the enumerative and statistical practices of the Indian state and their scandalization in the media. The political nature of suicide as public death thus depends entirely on suicide rates and their production by the state itself. But the power of representations complicates the ethnographic critique of statistical knowledge about suicide. In a context like Wayanad, which had been declared a suicide-prone district by the Indian state, public representations of suicides have taken on a life of their own; statistical categories and the media interpretations of these statistics have had a curious feedback—mediated by development encounters—onto the situated meanings of individual suicides. Local interpretations of individual suicides mostly commented on personal failures of the suicide and on the perils of speculative smallholder agriculture. Ethnography of farmers’ suicide based on case studies alone, however, would soon encounter limitations equally grave as the limitations of statistical analysis. Not only is the meaning of suicide (intentions, causes, motives) at the actor level off limits for ethnography, but in addition to that the (public) meaning of suicide is co-determined by state practice including statistical accounting. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]