PROVISIONING TRANSACTIONS AND THE REPRODUCTION OF AGRARIAN SOCIAL ORDERS

The jajmani system has often been seen as the model representation of rural provisioning transactions which link landed members of agrarian societies to the labour and service caste groups. However, attention t o a variant of provisioning transactions enacted in rural north Karnat aka indicates the extent to which these transactions differ from the j ajmani system and exemplify what might be called 'embedded' transactio ns. It is their embedded dimension, in which political and economic mo tivations are intertwined with the social and cultural, that enables t hese transaction to function, simultaneously, as a form of social repr oduction. However, recent shifts in the organisation of agriculture an d in the changing identities of low-ranked caste members have led to a decline in these transaction, producing ruptures in the reproduction of the local social order. While the articulation of these transaction s in their 'embedded' state camouflages their economic and social orie ntation, it is in their state of decline that the 'special logics' of these transactions can be discerned.