ArticleAnthropology & medicine2021
Cultivating distress: cotton, caste and farmer suicides in India.
Article in Anthropology & medicine, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed, 26 citations in OpenAlex.
- Honouring complexity and social justice in mental health: The socio-political economy of global mental health framework.PLOS mental health · 2026Article
- Seasonal and Sociodemographic Factors Associated With Farmer Suicide: National Violent Death Reporting System 2014-2021.Rural mental health · 2025Article
- Coverage of suicide deaths in newspapers and perceptions of suicide loss survivors on reporting: Insights from a community survey in India.PLOS mental health · 2025Article
- Solastalgia, our deteriorating environment, and Spirit of Place.Journal of biosciences · 2024Article
- Depressive Disorders and Associated Factors among Farmers in Andhra Pradesh: Results from a Cross-Sectional Study.Indian journal of occupational and environmental medicineArticle
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Nearly 4,00,000 farmers committed suicide in India between 1995 and 2018. This translates into approximately 48 suicides every day. The majority of suicides were those from 'backwarded' castes including Dalit farmers. This ethnographic study on cotton farmer suicide reports narratives of surviving Dalit families. The results reveal that financial and moral debt when accrued within a web of family and caste-related relationships result in patterns of personal and familial humiliation, producing a profound sense of hopelessness in the Self. This loss of hope and pervasive humiliation is 'cultivated' by a cascade of decisions taken by others with little or no responsibility to the farmers and the land they hope to cultivate as they follow different cultural and financial logic. Suicide resolves the farmers' humiliation and is a logical conclusion to the farmer's distress, which results from a reconfiguration of agricultural spaces into socially toxic places, in turn framing a local panopticon. The current corona virus pandemic is likely to impact adversely on peoples who are culturally distanced.
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