100 Books Like Crooked Stalks

This book helped me see how much damage is done when treating the world as simple.

Escobar never mentions complexity theory, but that's precisely what animates his critique—a sense that development thinking flattens difference, reduces context, and imposes order where none exists. I'd long been uneasy with how the West 'solves' problems it helped create. This book gave me the conceptual tools to see why: it exposed development as a discourse that makes the world legible in Western terms, only to intervene on that basis.

What I love about this book is its refusal to accept those terms. It shows how we get the world wrong by insisting it should resemble us in the West, and why the costs of that are always borne elsewhere.

The Will to Improve is most celebrated for its explanation of ‘rendering technical’: the ways complex, political factors contributing to poverty are reduced to those amenable to technical intervention.

But I have found Tania Li’s concept of ‘trustee’ the most useful in my work on local development actors: understanding how they come to take on the role of trustee, their desire to ‘improve’ others, and the prickly subjects that resist their efforts.

Li traces the ‘will to improve’ through 200 years of Indonesian history, but it is most powerfully elucidated through her rich ethnographic description from the province of Sulawesi.

Her analysis weaves together Marx, Foucault, and Gramsci, showing how theory can illuminate description. It is a masterclass in storytelling and the power of theory. 

Akhil Gupta asks why so many people in India suffer extreme poverty, and yet invite so little reaction.

His answer is structural violence. State inaction, or ineffective action, are part of the conditions that let people die from poverty.

The brilliance in Akhil Gupta’s work is inviting us to look at the state not as a coherent and unified entity, but as operating through multiple levels, agencies, and departments.

As someone interested in local development actors, I find his ethnographic accounts of low-level government offices and officials particularly compelling.

By showing everyday practices in these offices, and fine-grained encounters between officials and welfare recipients, Gupta shows how state indifference is produced, and challenged, in ways that shape life and death. 

Holly High addresses a question that puzzles students of development studies: why do people engage in development programs when they have such a poor record of success?

It is not due to a lack of cynicism or suspicion. Rather High shows that rural Laos residents continue to hold both unconscious and social desires for development, producing a “shared delirium” that contains its own rationalities.

Notably, Fields of Desire brings Lacanian and Deleuzian theories to the anthropology of development: a welcome respite from Foucault.

It is also an evocative ethnographic account of the experience of poverty, and poverty reduction programs in a Lao village. 

Wendell Berry is a Kentucky farmer, a prolific author, an environmental activist, cultural critic, and poet.

In this book, one of his many, he raises important questions about the practice of agriculture in the United States and some of the consequences including loss of small farms and communities, the ecological effects, energy use, and agriculture's externalities.

His work has been largely ignored by the agricultural community including most faculty in colleges of agriculture. He writes eloquently about his concern that man was not made to rule the world and his claim that to rule the world we must conquer it.

Humans and agriculture have conquered and ignored and externalized the cultural, environmental, and human costs, which Berry explores in detail. His work has not been ignored by the environmental community.

I like this one because it reveals what is wrong with modern meat production, not only within the broad context of industrial agriculture but also the governmental policies and corporate control of what we eat.

It ranges widely from corporate control of plant and animal genetics to who raises what we eat and dictates where and how it is grown, to the chemicals that go onto our fruits and vegetables and into our bodies, to government oversight and regulation of food safety and animal welfare; to corporate concentration at every link in the food chain.

But what I appreciate most of all is Hauter’s extensive and thoughtful analysis of what can be done to break up the foodopolies and rebuild a healthy and just food system.

While several books have been written about the horrors of industrial livestock production, none have moved me more than Blanchette’s Porkopolis.

With unforgettable stories and startling photographs, Blanchette details how workers perform all manner of intimate tasks to make industrial pigs reproduce and stay alive. I also love how he flips common-sense ideas of efficiency on their heads, showing how industrial meat production is anything but wasteful. Every bit of those pigs is used somewhere to the extent you wish they weren’t.

I have taught this book three times in my politics of food classes, and it never fails to blow my students away.

This book upended the common—and my—perception of progress in human agriculture. The common assumption was that the fortuitous invention of agricultural tools like the hoe, the plow, and fertilizer produced advances in human agriculture's productivity, permitting larger populations to be supported. Boserup argued that growing populations forced farming to be intensified by dramatically reducing fallow periods and demanding compensatory technological changes.

Stimulated by this book and aware of Lee’s work (above), I expanded her argument to include the origins and intensification of agriculture. Her concept of population “pressure” as a motivator of change underlies much of my later work.

This short (190-page) book shows how the global food system is intrinsically connected to world region’s diverse developmental trajectories, covering the colonial era to the green revolution to the contemporary corporate-dominated food system.

Historically, agriculture has been subordinated ever more tightly to capitalist imperatives of profit – based upon increased, faster, and cheaper production. Agriculture has been transformed from a ‘closed loop system’, where soil fertility was renewed based upon locally-available resources (such as animal manure), to a through-flow system dependent upon external inputs.

This shift raised yields for a while, but at the cost of soil exhaustion and the accumulation of power and resources in the hands of agrochemical companies at the expense of the small farmer sector.

Weis suggests that we need to consider new ways of producing our food, which would also establish new forms of world development. 

Farmer and author Wendell Berry is a personal hero of mine. From his home in Kentucky, Berry has been writing about regenerative agriculture for decades. The Art of the Commonplace gathers together twenty of his best essays. They articulate a compelling vision for people dissatisfied with the stress, anxiety, disease, and destructiveness of contemporary life. Berry is also the author of numerous works of poetry and fiction.