Shifting Landscapes

This book is a high quality ethnographic study in the classical sense. The fundamental question that Brara asks in her book is whether there are other ways of thinking about the village than in terms of its distinctions of caste, vertical ties created by patron-client relations of congregation of private propertied peasantry. She offers the idea that villagers can and do represent and act on matters of common concern but that this does not commit us to thinking of village communities as harmonious wholes. Brara explores the institutional arrangements (commons) as a concept to analyze ideas of common good, the emergence of public action and property rights in Indian villages. She breaks from existing paradigms of agency as located in peasant movements and subaltern history. She contends that these are imagined always in relation to an elite and instead offers the idea of the shifting frames within which sociality operates at the village level.