Scholars Award: A History of Hunger: Agricultural Science, State, and Modernization

学者奖：饥饿史：农业科学、国家和现代化

• 批准号: 1656130
• 负责人: Prakash Kumar
• 金额: $ 22.64万
• 依托单位: Pennsylvania State Univ University Park
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2017
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2017-08-15 至 2023-09-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1656130&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Scholars; Award; History; Hunger; Agricultural

Relations between external expertise and internal agricultural practices have been evolving throughout the twentieth century because of the drive to use science for enhancing food production and mitigating "hunger.? This project will study the particular framing of the problem of hunger by policy makers and state officials. It will explain how views and strategies of hunger impacted the effort toward modernization of agriculture in colonial and postcolonial India by Americans. Focusing on statist measures, expertise, and the experience of elites and subalterns this project will highlight efforts that tailored scientific knowledge specifically to the ends of production and neglected questions of distribution. The project will illustrate how the debate between production versus distribution strategies shaped the appropriation of American technologies. It will address scientific modernization from the domain of the political, the social, and the ecological. It will also provide an occasion to explore the convergences and disjunctures of differing stakeholders visions? of progress and the impact on technology use and practice. Historians of modern India have continued to explore the hows and whys of the arrested course of agricultural development in the twentieth-century. The existing scholarship characteristically relies on two core assumptions. On the one hand is the central belief of modernization theory that removal of concrete obstacles and impediments would lead to a self-perpetuating course of modernization becoming evident in the well-being of the masses. On the other hand, postcolonial scholarship in South Asian historiography continues to draw attention to the intransigence of subaltern life and consciousness that is arguably incommensurable with the logic of capitalist development. Scholars have highlighted the role of expert regime in agriculture to question the boundless power of experts and the state. In that regard this project explores the impact of the colonial moment and the American moment in the building of an expert grid in agriculture. The book argues that the agenda of technocratic modernization was engaged by groups with diverse political aims and social agenda, and connects that process of engagement with questions of rural inequality. It illustrates this interaction while exploring two sets of records in the United States and India. On the one hand, it focusses on the work by American Presbyterian missionaries, Point Four technical and social scientific experts, and the agriculture faculty from American public land grant universities in India. On the other hand, it explores the efforts launched by nationalists and the national state in India for reviving agriculture and rural community.

在整个20世纪，由于利用科学提高粮食生产和减轻“饥饿”的动力，外部专业知识与内部农业实践之间的关系一直在不断发展。该项目将研究决策者和国家官员对饥饿问题的具体理解。它将解释饥饿的观点和策略如何影响美国人在殖民和后殖民时期印度的农业现代化努力。该项目将重点关注统计主义的措施、专业知识以及精英和下层民众的经验，重点关注那些专门为生产目的量身定制科学知识的努力，而忽视了分配问题。该项目将说明生产与销售策略之间的争论如何影响了对美国技术的挪用。它将从政治、社会和生态的领域来解决科学现代化问题。它还将提供一个机会来探索不同利益相关者愿景的趋同和分歧。进步和对技术使用和实践的影响。现代印度的历史学家一直在继续探索20世纪农业发展停滞的原因和方式。现有学术研究的特点是依赖于两个核心假设。一方面是现代化理论的核心信念，即消除具体的障碍和障碍将导致现代化的自我延续过程，并在群众的福祉中变得明显。另一方面，南亚史学的后殖民学术继续关注下层生活和意识的不妥协，这可以说是与资本主义发展的逻辑不可比拟的。学者们强调专家制度在农业中的作用，质疑专家和国家的无限权力。在这方面，本项目探讨了殖民时期和美国时期对农业专家网格建设的影响。这本书认为，技术官僚现代化的议程是由具有不同政治目标和社会议程的群体参与的，并将这一参与过程与农村不平等问题联系起来。它通过探索美国和印度的两组记录来说明这种相互作用。一方面，它侧重于美国长老会传教士、第四点技术和社会科学专家以及美国在印度的公共土地授予大学的农业教师的工作。另一方面，探讨了民族主义者和民族国家在印度为振兴农业和农村社区所做的努力。