Seeing from the field.

The colloquium, as a reading list · Fall 2026

Countryside and city: what links them, and what each makes of the other.

This year’s theme asks how countryside and city see each other, and what moves between them: extraction, migration, credit, law and political order. Below is the public schedule, with one question of ours beside each session. The schedule is the Program’s; the questions are ours. Where a session or that week’s graduate seminar left us with something, our notes are folded beneath the row.

• 18 SeptLand, Learning, and Resistance: Yanomami Knowledge and Environmental JusticeEmil’ Keme, Emory UniversityOur questionWhat, if anything, of this knowledge can travel beyond the forest? Rights travel easily because they are abstract; the knowledge they are meant to protect does not.
• 25 SeptAgrarian Questions: The Latin American Novel on the Road to CapitalismEricka Beckman, University of PennsylvaniaOur questionThe Mexican state is everywhere in the history of the ejido and nowhere in Rulfo’s frozen present. Is that invisibility part of what traps his peasants?
  Colloquium · 25 SeptThe state in the flashbackOur notes

  The session took up Ericka Beckman’s Agrarian Questions (Verso, 2026). What is kept here is our own: the question we asked, and where it led when we went back to the novels themselves. Nothing said in the room by others is reported.

  The state appears once

  In Juan Rulfo’s “Nos han dado la tierra” (1953), a few men walk across a dry plain toward the land that reform has granted them. The state appears only in a remembered scene. An official tells them the land is theirs though it has no water, that their enemy is “the large estates … not the Government,” and that any complaint must be made in writing. The men cannot write. Akhil Gupta reads writing itself as the medium through which bureaucracy excludes the poor (Red Tape, 2012).

  For us.Every form we ask a family to fill in is a small version of that scene. We ask who in the household can write, and who has to ask someone else.

  Everywhere in the record, nowhere in the story

  The Mexican state never left the ejido. It created it, extended credit and price supports to it, and from 1938 organised ejidatarios into the ruling party through the National Peasant Confederation. Yet Rulfo’s stories hold no roads, no cars, no offices, though Rulfo himself travelled the countryside by highway in the 1950s, selling tyres and writing for a road guide.

  For us.When people tell us the government never comes, we ask what of the state is already there and simply not seen as the state.

  Naming is governing

  Ejidatario, comunero, inquilino read like local vocabulary, but many such words were written by land and labour law. Scott’s legibility runs in both directions: the state names people so that it can count them, and people then live inside the name and bargain with it.

  For us.The categories in our indicators will become words people use about themselves. We choose them as if they will stick.

  A cushion that becomes a graveyard

  The rural sociologist Ernest Feder warned that the small plot could turn from a “safety cushion” into the smallholder’s graveyard (Social Scientist, 1979). Roger Bartra called the Mexican pattern permanent primitive accumulation: reform tied households to plots too poor to live on, the cities could not absorb them, and people moved back and forth without arriving anywhere.

  For us.Support that keeps a household afloat can also keep it in place. We ask what a programme makes possible next, not only what it prevents.

  Who brings the electricity

  In José Donoso’s El lugar sin límites (1966), set during Chilean land reform, a dying town waits for electricity, and it is the landowner who promises to bring it. Infrastructure arrives, if it arrives, through a private patron rather than the state.

  For us.Where a state is thin, someone else gets the credit for the road or the clinic. We note whose name goes on the service, because that is whom people learn to petition.

  The question we are keeping. In Rulfo’s Mexico the state was present in law, credit and party, and absent from the stories people told about their lives. When a state is everywhere in the record and nowhere in experience, is that invisibility part of what makes time feel stopped?

  Read with: Juan Rulfo, El Llano en llamas (1953); José Donoso, El lugar sin límites (1966); Ernest Feder, “Regeneration and Degeneration of the Peasants”, Social Scientist (1979); Roger Bartra, Agrarian Structure and Political Power in Mexico (1993); James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State (1998); Akhil Gupta, Red Tape (2012); Ericka Beckman, Agrarian Questions (2026).

• 2 OctSeeing Like the State or Measuring Like a Peasant: A RevisitFrancisco Gutiérrez Sanín, Universidad Nacional de ColombiaNote to follow.
  Seminar · 30 SeptBlack peasantries, and freedom that had to be boughtOur notes

  The seminar read Claudia Leal, Landscapes of Freedom: Building a Postemancipation Society in the Rainforest of Western Colombia (2018), on the free Black communities of Colombia’s Pacific lowlands between 1850 and 1930. As with the colloquium, what is kept here is our own: what we noticed, and what it changes for SEESALT. Nothing said in the room by others is reported.

  Simultaneously

  Sidney Mintz wrote that the making of Caribbean peasantries was “simultaneously an act of Westernization and an act of resistance” (Caribbean Transformations, 1974). The weight sits on the first word. People who left the plantation to farm for themselves did it with the tools of the order they were leaving: private plots, markets, the church. The ambiguity is not a stage on the way to something cleaner.

  For us.A family that joins a programme to get out from under one constraint also takes on the programme’s terms. Neither half is the whole story.

  The largest flow is not the familiar one

  On the standard map of the Atlantic slave trade, the widest arrow crosses the South Atlantic from West Central Africa to Brazil and never touches Europe; mainland North America gets a thin line. Spanish America looks small too, partly because many captives reached it second-hand through Caribbean ports (Borucki, Eltis and Wheat, American Historical Review, 2015). The first and last known transatlantic slaving voyages both landed in Spanish colonies.

  For us.Before generalising, we ask which case our intuitions were built on.

  Freedom that was paid for

  In the gold-mining lowlands, enslaved people worked their free days for themselves and bought their freedom; Leal calls it freedom “paid for rather than granted” (p. 51). Across the Atlantic world, freedom was nearly always paid for by someone. The British state compensated slaveholders in the 1830s. Spanish American free-womb laws made the children of enslaved mothers serve their mothers’ owners until eighteen or later. In the lowlands, the enslaved paid in their own gold. Almost no one paid the freed.

  For us.When a programme asks people to co-invest in their own way out, we ask who else is being paid, and who is not.

  Laziness is a labour complaint

  Leal borrows Michael Taussig’s “moral topography” for the way Colombian elites mapped Blackness onto a hellish jungle, and missions set out to cure lowlanders of laziness. The charge recurs wherever freed people had land to fall back on and declined to work for others; Thomas Carlyle made it about Jamaica in 1849.

  For us.Before reading low turnout as apathy, we ask what people can fall back on. It is Scott’s lesson seen from the other side: refusal can be made to look like idleness.

  Autonomy at the edge of the state

  The lowlanders’ autonomy rested partly on the state not reaching them. A state that lived on concessions to outside capital and on taxing exports had little reason to bargain with the people who mined and gathered. Freedom and state absence were produced together.

  For us.Making a place legible to a programme can end the autonomy its illegibility protected. Adaptation Lab’s indicators have to be read with that cost in view.

  One church, two theologies

  In the early twentieth century Colombia handed the schooling of its frontier mission territories, the Chocó among them, to Catholic missions. In the 1980s, church pastoral teams in the same Chocó, shaped by liberation theology, helped Black river communities organise; that road led to Law 70 of 1993 and collective land titles. Both times the church stood in for a thin state. What changed was the direction, and the change was one of time more than of place.

  For us.SEESALT often works where the state is thin. That position is never neutral, and it can point either way.

  The question we are keeping. Mintz tied peasantry to cultivation, and Eric Wolf’s classic definition begins with “rural cultivators” too. Leal’s lowlanders panned gold, fished, gathered tagua and farmed. Keep the rest of Wolf’s definition, a household working for itself while yielding a surplus to others, drop the word “cultivators”, and they are peasants without a plough. Does “peasant” need agriculture at all?

  Read with: Sidney W. Mintz, Caribbean Transformations (1974); Claudia Leal, Landscapes of Freedom (2018); Alex Borucki, David Eltis and David Wheat, “Atlantic History and the Slave Trade to Spanish America”, American Historical Review (2015); Eric R. Wolf, Peasants (1966).

• 9 OctRacializing Water and Agrarian Belonging in a Changing ClimateMargiana Peterson-Rockney, University of MontanaNote to follow.
• 16 OctOf Carbon and Displacement: India’s Compensatory ForestsChitrangada Choudhury, University of ZurichNote to follow.
• 30 OctTobacco’s Enemy Number One: Palestinian Fellahin Managing Blue Mold Under Military GovernmentBasma Fahoum, Ben-Gurion University of the NegevNote to follow.
• 6 NovThe Salmon, the Cow, and the Spotted Owl: Endangerment and Federal Power in the American WestMeghan Morris, Temple UniversityNote to follow.
• 13 NovFoothold: Popular Land Control at the Urban Frontier in IndonesiaChristian Lund, University of CopenhagenNote to follow.
• 4 DecCivil Law and Agrarian Capitalism(?) in Late Ottoman Gaza: Old Questions, New SourcesNora Barakat, Stanford UniversityNote to follow.
• 11 DecToo Many Bulls: More-Than-Human Kinship in Borana, EthiopiaYayi Zheng, Visiting Fellow, Program in Agrarian StudiesNote to follow.

Schedule from the Program’s colloquium page. To attend, subscribe to the Program’s mailing list there.