ICM NEW CONVERSATIONS SERIES
Spring 2026
AMIEL BIZE (Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, Cornell University)
Tuesday, March 24, 2026 (note new date)
Klarman Hall, KG42
Abstract
“How is capitalism seizing hold of agriculture, revolutionizing it…?”—Karl Kautsky’s The Agrarian Question, published in 1899, was the major Marxist text of its time; its questions have preoccupied generations of agrarian scholars. I build on this work to propose a “postagrarian question” for rural western Kenya, where agriculture is no longer a primarily source of livelihoods. Neither peasants nor proletarians, rural households put together their incomes through combinations of rent, gathering, small business, and self-exploitation. Thinking from this context, defined more by a scramble for reproduction than by production, and more by the absence of wage labor than by the presence of agrarian aspirations, I argue that we must differentiate the rural from the agrarian to renew our questions about the ongoing effects of capitalist development on the countryside.
Bio
Amiel Bize is an economic anthropologist and Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, Cornell, whose research focuses on social and economic transformations at capitalist margins. Her research interests include value and post-agrarian rural life, financialization and geographies of difference, postcolonial approaches to the economy, and the importance of leftovers. She has taught courses on racial capitalism, Marx and anthropology, gleaning, and the social life of money. Her writing appears in a variety of journals and public forums, including Cultural Anthropology, Planning Theory, and Etnofoor.
