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The nature of documents

Concerning the nature of documents and field notes, this section attempts to look at how participants are engaging with field work work vis-a-vis the practice of recording and writing, and ways of encapsulating everyday processes. It further looks at the significance of documents to think through the nature of information.

Some questions that we collectively think through are:

What are the various kinds of documents that we generate as practitioners and the impulses behind them?

For whom do we document our practices?

What is the context in which the document gets presented and activated?

When the document is displaced from its actual context and situated in another one, what are the ways in which the documents risk being stereotyped and generalised?

What does the nature of documents tell us about dependencies between the agrarian field and various allied disciplines?

Viewing the Elemental

“To see a seed grow after sowing; to know weathers, ploughing, threshing; to know the mud, the monsoon, and the making of food from these grains affords different notions of continuity. It also affords the knowledge that things don’t change overnight. It is to know aging, labor, exhaustion, and silence. To know that revolutions don’t happen immediately, but endures in gravity, in its life force; in its nights and days of labor, its slow stirrings, its cooking and feeding each other; in doing what needs to be done.”

- Sarover Zaidi

What are the elements we encounter when we study the agrarian? How are they factored into field practices on micro and macro levels?

By asking these questions, we are keen to observe how minutiae within the agrarian are amplified via various modes of enquiry, and how individual efforts are made to conserve, preserve and continually acknowledge the significance of each such element.

These elements are nodal points in themselves, generating and fostering systems of connectivity and life through their multiplicities, influencing and affecting the cyclical processes of production and economy within the agrarian.