Fragmentary Virtues and Assembled Traditions : The Dietary Prescriptions of Farmer-Environmentalists in South India

Despite having a fundamental connection with food production, a farmer with three-four acres of land living in an Indian village is not an image that comes to our mind when we readthe anthropological literature on people making ethical and health-related choices in their food consumption. Coming out of a year-long ethnography in Tiruvannamalai district in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu, this paper presents the dietary schedules, health choices and medicinal articulations of small-scale farmers who engage in the production, conservation and selling of native rice and vegetable varieties. These bodily virtues are often drawn from varied sources, such as everyday sayings, folklore and literary texts, in a fragmented way. Creating new networks, finding appropriate processing methods and ‘translating’ their wisdom and principles to their buyers - the paper also discusses these hidden labours that those farmers perform as they are made to find their own channels for processing and marketing their farm outputs both within and outside their district. The farmers’ meetings, seed campaigns, and the food festivals that they conduct also help them expand their consumer base and gain legitimacy – thus blurring the distinction between the campaign and their commercial interests. In this way, an attempt has been made to challenge the theoretical limiting of farmers to the production aspect of the agroecological discourse that, in actuality, encompasses a broad range of entities spanning the production-distribution-consumption spectrum. A deeper look at the farmers’ perception and practical enunciation of tradition and indigeneity is also carried out to critique both the works that assume that farmers of the global South inherit a knowledge system passed on smoothly through their respective traditions and the frameworks that reject the articulations of indigeneity and alterity altogether.