Amita Baviskar
1230 hrs
20 November 2012
Old Committee Room, King’s College London, Strand campus, Second floor
In the last three decades, although India has witnessed radical shifts in the modes of producing and consuming food, this has stimulated surprisingly little analytical attention. The changing political economy of food production and consumption and its role in reshaping social identities and agrarian environments remains remarkably understudied. This lecture outlines the preliminary contours of a project that attempts to analyse some of these shifts through a selective discussion of changing food practices in post-Independence western India. It delineates the widening circuits of food as a commodity form within the home and outside, spanned by the growth of processed foods and practices of 'eating out'. It outlines the changing signification of food practices for different social groups, and considers some potential health and ecological implications arising from the transformation. It makes the case for focused attention on food as a way of understanding social change in India.
Amita Baviskar is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi. Her research focuses on the cultural politics of environment and development. Her first book In the Belly of the River: Tribal Conflicts over Development in the Narmada Valley (2004) discussed the struggle for survival by adivasis in central India against a large dam. Her subsequent work further explores the themes of resource rights, subaltern resistance and cultural identity. More recently, she has focused on urban environmental politics, especially bourgeois environmentalism and spatial restructuring in the context of economic liberalisation in Delhi. Her latest research examines changing food practices in western India in relation to the transformation of agrarian environments. She has edited Waterlines: The Penguin Book of River Writings (2004);Waterscapes: The Cultural Politics of a Natural Resource (2007);Contested Grounds: Essays on Nature, Culture and Power (2008); and Elite and Everyman: The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Classes (with Raka Ray, 2011). She has taught at the University of Delhi, and has been a visiting scholar at Stanford, Cornell, Yale and the University of California at Berkeley. She was awarded the 2005 Malcolm Adiseshiah Award for Distinguished Contributions to Development Studies, the 2008 VKRV Rao Prize for Social Science Research, and the 2010 Infosys Prize for Social Sciences.
Amita Baviskar is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi. Her research focuses on the cultural politics of environment and development. Her first book In the Belly of the River: Tribal Conflicts over Development in the Narmada Valley (2004) discussed the struggle for survival by adivasis in central India against a large dam. Her subsequent work further explores the themes of resource rights, subaltern resistance and cultural identity. More recently, she has focused on urban environmental politics, especially bourgeois environmentalism and spatial restructuring in the context of economic liberalisation in Delhi. Her latest research examines changing food practices in western India in relation to the transformation of agrarian environments. She has edited Waterlines: The Penguin Book of River Writings (2004);Waterscapes: The Cultural Politics of a Natural Resource (2007);Contested Grounds: Essays on Nature, Culture and Power (2008); and Elite and Everyman: The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Classes (with Raka Ray, 2011). She has taught at the University of Delhi, and has been a visiting scholar at Stanford, Cornell, Yale and the University of California at Berkeley. She was awarded the 2005 Malcolm Adiseshiah Award for Distinguished Contributions to Development Studies, the 2008 VKRV Rao Prize for Social Science Research, and the 2010 Infosys Prize for Social Sciences.
King’s India Institute
King’s College London
Strand
London WC2R 2LS
Tel.: 020 7848 1432
