Technologies of Recognition: Making Up Caste People Through Toxic and Green Infrastructures

• In Event: Disrupting Racial Formations in Science and Technology (Co-sponsored by Race and Ethnic Minorities Section)

Abstract

This paper examines how caste is materially reproduced and transformed through agrarian technologies in rural Bihar, India. Drawing on ten months of ethnographic fieldwork, I trace how infrastructures such as agrochemical stores and solar irrigation pumps function as caste-saturated sites that consolidate dominant agricultural castes’ control over chemically intensive vegetable farming and climate-resilience initiatives. Access to these infrastructures is mediated by caste networks, kinship ties, and institutional classification. Dominant agricultural caste men are widely perceived—and institutionally affirmed—as “real farmers,” a designation that legitimizes their command over agri-input markets and irrigation technologies. I argue that Ian Hacking’s notion of the “looping effect” reveals the material and infrastructural embedding of caste and its environmental consequences. Through these looping effects, classificatory practices and the people they describe become stabilized, actionable, and re-embedded in new ecological terrains. Yet these loops are leaky: they permit contestation and unanticipated reconfigurations that can unsettle dominant caste positions even as they reinforce them. The looping of caste and agrarian infrastructure thus make up “caste people”—subjects continually made and remade through interactions with systems that appear neutral but are deeply socially saturated.

Author

• Anupriya Pandey, State University Of New York ,Buffalo