Cultivating Democracy: Politics and Citizenship in Agrarian India (MODERN SOUTH ASIA SERIES)

"This book is an anthropological study of the relationship of formal political democracy and the cultivation of active citizenship in one particular rural setting in India, studied from 1998 to 2013. It draws on deep ethnographic engagement with the people and social life in two villages both during elections and in the time in between them, to show how these two temporalities connect. The analysis shows how an agrarian village society produces the social imaginaries required for democratic and republican values. The ethnographic microscope on a single paddy growing setting allows us to examine how the various social institutions of kinship, economy and religion are critical sites for the continual civic cultivation of cooperation, vigilance, redistribution, inviolate commitment and hope - values that are essential for democracy"--