ABSTRACT
As the title of this book clearly conveys, we are now confronted with a number of agrarian questions whose scope reaches well beyond the conceptual domains of political economy, neo-modernisation frameworks, or global commodity chains to encompass issues concerning the social, cultural, and institutional embeddedness of agrarian livelihoods, agricultural development, and commodity systems. This is not to say, of course, that these earlier formulations never addressed any important cultural or institutional dimensions or that their contributions are now completely irrelevant to understanding contemporary agrarian processes. Rather, the point is that after postmodern deconstructionism, we are left with the impossible task of picking up the pieces of grand narrative, whatever their genre.
