Ritual as image

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.