Market-driven dairying and the politics of value, labor and affect in Gujarat, India

Abstract

Ethnography in Gujarat, India’s poster-state of market reforms, recovers what transpires when the individual embraces capital for market-driven production. This contribution reports on resource-poor rural households who embark on dairying through buffaloes acquired with microcredit. The essay discusses the politics of economic value, and economic value encountering other values, lifeworlds and affective relations related to work, humans and non-human others. These phenomena interrupt commodity production. Human–animal relations challenge both capitalism’s treatment of bovines as machines, and the bovine politics of Hindu nationalism rooted in ignorance of rural economy, lifeworlds and livelihoods.