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Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0009-0001-5477-6889
Date Available
5-8-2027
Year of Publication
2026
Document Type
Master's Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
College
Arts and Sciences
Department/School/Program
Geography
Faculty
Nari Senanayake
Faculty
Nick Lally
Abstract
Sri Lanka’s 2020 economic crisis has led to concerns regarding the state’s capacity to support localities through precarity in relation to food production and everyday living. This study examines this aspect of crisis through an exploration of home gardens in Kandy, Sri Lanka and their capacity to mitigate and maneuver around moments of crisis and precarity through the development of cultivations, sociocultural relations, and melded diverse economic forms. In Kandy, home gardens are a long-held historical small-scale agriculture practice that evolved out of Kandyan forest gardens, an agroforestry practice that combined maintenance of a forest landscape with intentional and interspersed cultivation of produce, including vegetables, fruits, spices, trees, and ornamental species. Drawing on diverse economic frameworks and studies on everyday precarity, I demonstrate how home gardens function as a multi-use system of subsistence agriculture that weaves together gift economies of gift-as-exchange, communal cultivations on privatized lands (based in the locality), responses to precarity through agentic food production in the home garden, and the paradox of precarity through home garden continuity and state support.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.13023/etd.2026.246b
Archival?
Archival
Funding Information
This study was supported by the Barnhart-Withington Block (BWB) fund and a Food Connection grant. Both awards were allocated in 2025 for fieldwork that summer. Both funding sources are internal to the University of Kentucky.
Recommended Citation
Abeyrathne, Dilni T., "MUSINGS OF THE HOME GARDEN: CONTRIBUTIONS OF SMALL-SCALE AGRICULTURE TO INFORMAL ECONOMIES AND RELATIONAL ECOLOGIES IN SELECT RURAL AND SEMI-RURAL VILLAGES IN KANDY, SRI LANKA" (2026). Theses and Dissertations--Geography. 118.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/geography_etds/118
