Salvage Crops, “Savage” People: A Comparative Anthropological and Archaeobotanical Investigation of Millet Assemblages in India.

Millets, grasses grown mostly in Africa and India, used to be marginalized as “poor-man’s food”. Now they are globally regarded as crucial for the UN’s Sustainable-Development-Goals due to their excellent nutritional and ecological properties. In order to promote millets, the Indian state of Odisha recently initiated the “Millets Mission” in regions inhabited by millet-cultivating indigenous peoples (Adivasis). However, agro-scientists and policymakers fail to recognize the cultural dimensions of food-crop production. While they now consider millets as salvage crops, the original Adivasi cultivators are considered backward and their cultures curtailed. This jeopardizes the sustainability of the policies. However, the argument stands that biodiversity depends on cultural diversity.

The policies entail new configurations and valuations of millets that relate people, crops, ideas and technology in novel ways. The project aims to investigate the full complexity of human engagements with millets in these changing circumstances. Understanding the conditions, dynamics and implications of crop selection is crucial for a sustainable future. This will be achieved by uniquely integrating the approaches of anthropology and archaeobotany and combining ethnographic and historical perspectives.

The project will be split into two ethnographic case studies involving long-term fieldwork in two communities in Odisha that use different traditional farming systems. The goal is to examine and compare the two groups in relation to the recent developments.
The first study deals with those indigenous communities that inhabit the mountainous highlands and practice shifting cultivation. This is an extensive mulitple cropping system, i.e., different species of millets are grown in the same field along with pulses, roots, and fruits. Millet is the most mportant staple food for these communities.
The site of the second ethnographic study is the Koraput Plateau in Odisha, where millets and different varieties of rice are complementary traditional staples grown in different ways – millets are grown in permanent dry fields, while the specific ecological conditions of the plateau allow wet rice cultivation in terraced riverbeds. While rice is a new crop among shifting cultivators in the mountainous highlands, rice cultivation on the plateau is an ancient practice and, together with millet cultivation, is deeply rooted in ritual and worldview.

This project was also presented at the 19th Conference of the International Workgroup for Paleoethnobotany (IWGP) in Ceske Budejovice, 2022 The poster, created and presented by Dr. Sonja Filatova especially for the IWGP, can be seen here.