Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the central Indian cotton belt, I examine two historical moments: (1) the expansion of agrarian capitalism and absorption of market logics into the peasant household in the colonial period; and (2) changes in seed technology and gendered labor required for cultivating hybrid cotton in the postcolonial era. Through these transformations, cotton farmers have maintained a harvest ritual in the fields. Through a comparison of contemporary and historical versions of this ritual, a new theory of ritual emerges, one that displaces the primacy of the linguistic sign, instead considering the semiotic force of the image. Ritual, in this rendering, is not only a material archive of social history but also an aesthetic and creative practice through which women farmers sacralize their own labor. Amid transforming regimes of cash-crop agriculture, the ritual situates regimes of cotton growing in the bodily and affective labor of the female farming body.

中文翻译：

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仪式作为图像

借助印度中部棉花带的民族志田野调查，我考察了两个历史时刻：（1）殖民时期农业资本主义的扩张和市场逻辑对农户的吸收； (2)后殖民时代种植杂交棉所需的种子技术和性别劳动力的变化。通过这些转变，棉农在田间保持了收获仪式。通过比较这种仪式的当代和历史版本，一种新的仪式理论出现了，它取代了语言符号的首要地位，而是考虑了图像的符号学力量。从这个角度来看，仪式不仅是社会历史的物质档案，也是女农民神圣化自己劳动的审美和创造性实践。在经济作物农业制度的变革中，这种仪式将棉花种植制度置于女性农耕体的身体和情感劳动中。