The toil for soil: Earthing agricultural care in the Western Himalaya

This article theorises toil as the embodied, temporally extended labour through which soil is made durable, compromised and sometimes abandoned in the Western Himalaya. Responding to crisis framings that universalise soil degradation without engaging questions of embodiment or labour we ask: when, and for whom, does care become worth the toil of making and repairing degraded soils? How are these valuations negotiated across bodies organised according to gender, caste and shifting livelihoods? The analysis rests on multi-sited ethnography undertaken in Himachal Pradesh (2018–2023), including participant observation with apple growers, agrochemical resellers, activists and bureaucrats, and seventy-six semistructured interviews. Conceptually, we draw together ideas from feminist STS and postcolonial anthropology, extending debates on maintenance and care by specifying the “toiling self” as a coconstitutive object of care alongside soils themselves. Thus, we argue, bodies, affects and capacities must all be maintained for care to endure. We develop three associated claims. First, toil names a constitutive tension between virtue and fate: it can affirm dignity and belonging while exhausting bodies and foreclosing futures. Second, toil is a battle with “nature” both terrestrial and corporeal, as cultivable soils are continually made via struggles against forest regrowth, feral animals and bodily breakdown. This means that care must be understood as always-already partial, selective and contested. Third, indifference can be thought of as an ethical-political valuation required in such contexts: some soils and practices are let go as households recalibrate time, money, compost, irrigation and wage labour. Empirically, we bring these threads together to show how jowari (collective labour) and changing markets contribute toward reorganising the costs of maintaining soil, and how women's and men's roles are reworked as manure scarcity and changing aspirations impact on agricultural futures.