The jajmani system has often been seen as the model representation of rural provisioning transactions which link landed members of agrarian societies to the labour and service caste groups. However, attention to a variant of provisioning transactions enacted in rural north Karnataka indicates the extent to which these transactions differ from the jajmani system and exemplify what might be called 'embedded' transactions. It is their embedded dimension, in which political and economic motivations are intertwined with the social and cultural, that enables these transactions to function, simultaneously, as a form of social reproduction. However, recent shifts in the organisation of agriculture and in the changing identities of low- ranked caste members have led to a decline in these transactions, producing ruptures in the reproduction of the local social order. While the articulation of these transactions in their 'embedded' state camouflages their economic and social orientation, it is in their state of decline that the 'special logics' of these transactions can be discerned.
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