Entangled Temporalities: Agrarian Transitions and Climate Perceptions in Rural Sri Lanka

Abstract (English)

In Pattiyawala, a small agricultural village in the north-eastern dry zone of Sri Lanka’s Anuradhapura District, the urgency to adapt to climate change emerges as a multifaceted and contested process. This region, increasingly exposed to erratic weather patterns – marked by both prolonged droughts and sudden floods – has seen a gradual yet significant shift from subsistence agriculture to market-driven models of production. These changes have intensified the entanglements between ecological processes, infrastructural transformations, and evolving social imaginaries, reshaping how risk and urgency are locally perceived and responded to.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork – both observational and participatory – this paper explores how smallholder farmers in Pattiyawala make sense of, and live through, the changing climate. Their perceptions are embedded in overlapping temporalities: memories of past disruptions, mytho-historical narratives, shifting agrarian and spiritual relations, and encounters with state-led development schemes. Climate change, in this context, is not simply a future threat but an unfolding experience negotiated through embodied knowledge and socio-material practices.
Focusing on recent agrarian transitions – such as the increasing adoption of monoculture to secure immediate economic returns – the paper highlights the dissonance between accelerated adaptation measures and local rhythms of sustainability. Environmental impacts like pest infestations, declining water availability, and intensified human-wildlife encounters are read as manifestations of deeper socio-ecological fractures rather than isolated climatic events.
This paper argues for a rethinking of urgency – not as a call for rapid intervention, but as a site of negotiation shaped by human and non-human entanglements, historical continuities, and epistemic pluralism. It advocates for adaptive strategies that foreground traditional farming knowledge, participatory governance, and situated forms of resilience – approaches that are more attuned to the temporal textures of lived experience and the complex ecologies of agrarian life.