Toward a critical caste ecology

How does agrochemical harm interact with caste relations in rural India

Dados Bibliográficos

ID3262170
AutoresAnupriya Pandey (Department of Sociology and Criminology , State University of New York at Buffalo, 430 Park Hall, North Campus, Buffalo, NY 14260, autor correspondente)
Ano2025
Data de publicação2025-09-23
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoSocial Problems (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0037-7791 • E-ISSN: 1533-8533
EditoraOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/socpro/spaf048
OpenAlexW4414425634
IdiomaEN
Referências citadas70

Caste, despite its obvious relationships with land, colonialism, and injustice, is largely missing in sociological conversations about environment. Yet over one and a half billion human lives are structured through it, as are many more nonhuman lives. Building on existing scholarship that foregrounds caste and its ecological entanglements, this paper develops a framework that I call "critical caste ecologies." By challenging the dominant paradigms of environmental justice shaped by both Western and Brahmanical epistemologies, the framework traces the historicity and materiality of caste relations and how they are maintained and reproduced by socio-environmental change. I first compare critical caste ecologies with critical environmental justice studies, demonstrating their shared concerns and how they differ. Drawing on ethnographic data, I examine caste in conjuncture with agrochemical environmental harm. By analyzing the emergence of pesticide stores and agrochemical networks shaped by "backward caste" farmers, this article highlights how caste-based social relations are actively reproduced by simultaneously transforming rural ecologies and Dalit livelihoods. I conclude by highlighting the advantages of using critical caste ecologies as a tool to unpack caste-based differentiation and its impact on socio-ecological life

Agrochemical · Caste · Environmental justice · Ethnography · Materiality (auditing) · Scholarship · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Social and Economic Development in India