Shifting production/shifting consumption: A political ecology of health perceptions in Kumaon, India

Carly E Nichols

doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2015.06.018

•I analyze qualitative research I conducted in Kumaon, Uttarakhand in North India.•I find state-led agricultural development results in new food consumption practices.•Villagers report diminished perceptions of health due to changes in the food system.•These reports are evidence of changes in bodily well-being and new subjectivities.•Political ecology of health provides useful framework for analysis. Despite rapid economic growth, India has not seen the improvements in food and nutritional security that other developing countries have had. This “Asian enigma” has generated a wealth of economistic analyses seeking to explain the persistence of poor nutrition, yet few studies have looked at everyday experiences of changing food systems, and how this impacts nutritional practices as well as the processes of subject formation. In this paper, I draw on qualitative research conducted in Uttarakhand, North India and examine how state-led shifts in agricultural production have resulted in changing food consumption practices and diminished perceptions of health. Villagers link this decreased health to increased chemicals in home-produced food, greater dependence on the market for food purchases, and generational changes in dietary preferences. Despite villagers’ cognizance of the negative health effects of these practices, they largely view these byproducts of capitalistic development with an air of inevitability. Following Mansfield (2011) this paper contributes to the political ecology of health literature by employing the concept of food as a “vector of intercorporeality” (Stassart and Whatmore, 2003:449) and bringing this into conversation with a poststructuralist understanding of subjectivity. I argue that within shifting landscapes of agriculture production and food consumption, notions of diminished health are indicative of the complex and always incomplete processes of subject formation. I view shifting health perceptions as intimate bodily resistances to agricultural development, and conclude that within agricultural development programs a focus on bodily health and well-being is a fecund platform for further experimental research that seeks to imagine development differently.

Shifting production/shifting consumption: A political ecology of health perceptions in Kumaon, India

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