Post-Agrarian Questions

Post-agrarian questions arise from the collision of existing socio-ecological forms, intimately tied to agriculture, and new economic and cultural realities that are reworking land relations. This Symposium challenges both conventional views of agrarian transition and Marxist formulations of agrarian questions by probing the space between the arrival of new opportunities and the durability of rurality. Taking our cue from postcolonial studies, we ask how lived experiences, intergenerational struggles, and institutional and ecological structures from more agrarian days exert force on the present. Post-agrarian questions present a methodological imperative to think historically and often ethnographically, moving beyond teleological theories of transition to unite city and countryside into a single field with differentiated histories. As an analytical exercise, formulating post-agrarian questions helps to explain surprises in the countryside and to imagine rural futures, even after land's end.