Planting and performing: Anxiety, aspiration, and “scripts” in Telangana cotton farming
On cotton farms in Telangana, India, performance draws attention to farmers’ work not merely as an economic activity but as directed toward different kinds of audiences and in conversation with different roles,stages, and scripts.
Importantly, this performance is contextualized by a neoliberal seed market where a seasonal deluge of accelerated and consumerist seed marketing diminishes the value of experiential knowledge in favor of the expansion of private genetically modified (GM) seed sales.