Indian farmers adopted land speculation as local agency, not co-optation.

Evidence

Anthropologist Carol Upadhya (2020), for instance, describes how farmers in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh threw themselves enthusiastically into land speculation to navigate uncertainty and to “renegotiate their futures” (19). Revealingly, Upadhya notes that those farmers’ new “speculative economic habitus” (20) was not a case of neoliberal co-optation but reshaped instead by local citizens, in a project where “regional capital and political actors … inserted themselves into the development and planning process, drawing on a regional cultural economy of speculative accumulation and caste affiliation, in turn infusing land with new values as they reconfigure their own lives and futures” (20). — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 495

Categorization

• XREF: Strong evidence for the claim that speculation is not merely imposed by capital but reshaped by local actors—supports the reader’s assessment of whether ‘counter-speculation’ is possible.
• SEED: An essay angle: local ‘speculative habitus’ as a global pattern—India’s farmers, Deccan traders, rural voters all betting under uncertainty.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living With…, 495