Farming Women, Time and the `Re-agrarianization' of Consciousness

Abstract

The article examines the suggestion that an ecological time concept might be achieved by the `re-agrarianization' of consciousness: as in agriculture, thought and action are to be related to the pace of natural processes. Data from empirical investigations of time management amongst women involved in peasant agriculture are used to indicate that, although peasant agrarian time does contain important elements of ecological time, agrarian time is also always formed by social processes and power structures. This is evident at the moment, particularly given that structural changes in peasant agriculture are leading to an industrialization and `denaturalization' of agrarian time. At present, the garden, more than anywhere else, seems to be the place in which farming women can experience a `good time'.

Attending to grape vines: perceptual practices, planty agencies and multiple temporalities in Australian viticulture

“…Numerous anthropological studies present agricultural success and survival as depending upon a fluent temporal coordination between human action and changes in key animal and plant species (Evans-Pritchard 1969;Gell 1992;Thompson 1967). This literature thus figures the ability to perform the right tasks at the right times-to respond in timely and sensitive fashion to crops' or livestock's needs and development-as making the difference between scarcity and abundance, or between Attending to grape vines: perception, plants, temporalities 947 hardship and prosperity, for agriculturalists (Harris 1998;Inhetveen 1994).…”

“…Yet uncritically valorising broadly nonindustrial agricultural time regimes due to their 'naturalness' and autonomy from human control can occasion a somewhat romantic nostalgia for the 'earthiness' of manual labour conducted by subsistence farmers or in private gardens sheltered from capitalist economic imperatives (for instance , Inhetveen 1994;Pollan 2002). It thus risks encouraging a disengagement from the political tensions and ecological problems which practitioners of 'conventional' agriculture must negotiate (Head and Atchison 2009).…”

“…The presumption often seems to be that as crop plants are subjected to the clock's mechanised and quantified 'social time', a more authentically planty time, closely coupled to 'natural cycles' of changes in the environment in which they grow, is lost (Adam 1990;Jones and Cloke 2002;Marder 2013). Contemporary agriculture's temporal practices thus come to stand as examples of a wider, and ecologically catastrophic, dissonance between human social time and natural environmental rhythms (Adam 1998;Inhetveen 1994).…”

“…Expanding upon a wellestablished turn to studying more-than-human dimensions of social life (Clark 2011;Hustak and Myers 2012;Whatmore 2002;Whatmore and Hinchliffe 2010), geographers are enthusiastically exploring human-plant relationships within gardening practices (Cloke and Pawson 2008;Ginn 2008;Hitchings 2007;Hitchings and Jones 2004) and human engagements with wild or feral vegetation (Barker 2008;Franklin 2006). Yet interventions investigating human-plant interactions in agricultural settings remain comparatively rare (although see Head, Atchison and Gates 2012;Inhetveen 1994;Jones and Cloke 2002;Richardson-Ngwenya 2012).…”

“…Teasing out relations and tensions between these practices, I argue that each enacts both its own form of time and its own account of how grape vines act and are affected. By exploring this multiplicity of planty times and agencies, I question prevalent accounts of agriculture as either harmoniously conforming to a singular natural time (Inhetveen 1994) or oppressively imposing a purely 'social' clock-time upon subjugated crop plants (Adam 1998). Instead, I suggest, attending to the practice of time-reckoning in viticulture renders perceptible the tensions and stresses which emerge as cultivators attend to or ignore particular forms of activity and change in their crops.…”