Rethinking the value of unpaid care work: lessons from participatory visual research in central Tanzania

Abstract

The contemporary international development agenda addresses several important gender issues, including the contribution of unpaid care work (UCW) to human well-being. The inclusion of UCW into the mainstream policy debate is undoubtedly a major milestone in the history of feminist scholarship and activism. However, we argue that the universalistic and capitalocentric assumptions laden in the dominant policy discourse belie the diversity of the lived experiences and subjective meanings of UCW often performed by women and girls in different cultural and geographical contexts, particularly in the predominantly agrarian global South. We draw on participatory and visual ethnographic fieldwork to show that rural women in Tanzania perceive UCW as an experience that entails not only physical toil and drudgery, but also positive emotions of joy, satisfaction, and fulfilment, which are integral to affirming their self-perceived identities and roles as farmers and mothers in their communities. These material, affective, and symbolic dimensions of UCW emerge from agrarian women’s situated knowledges and experiences of ensuring household social reproduction on and with the land, as well as the gender relations and seasonal dynamics that shape the organization of work tasks in agrarian landscapes. To achieve transnational gender justice, we suggest that a more fine-tuned and nuanced approach to understanding the variability and complexity of care work as practiced and perceived by heterogeneous groups of women (and men) in particular places and times is needed.     

The development of the agrarian landscape on gotland during the early iron age

The author discusses the investigations on prehistoric agrarian landscape recently started on the island of Gotland. Main attention is focused on traces of deserted (fossilised) fields. Systematic reconnaissance in 1972–73 all over the island has brought forth a quite new material with ‘Celtic fields’ of a very great size and regional extent. The reconnaissance and regional mapping are mainly carried out by aerial photography.

Through the field work, which started in 1973 at Uggårde‐Vinarve in Rone parish, it has been possible to demonstrate a continuous field system to a total extent of about 130 hectares (325 acres). This field pattern is superimposed by a new agrarian landscape structure with building remains and stone wall fencing systems as the dominating features. The two stratigraphically separated structures of agrarian landscape put into an agrarian economic context indicate a development from extensive farming with long fallow periods to intensive farming with established land‐use (arable, meadow, and grazing) on smaller areas than formerly. A rough dating of the two structures gives 500 — 100 B. C. and 100 B. C. ‐ A. D. 500 respectively.

The investigations carried on by geographers and archaeologists in collaboration with Quaternary geologists are included in a research project by the Swedish Council for Social Science Research.     

Reviving Agrarian Studies in South‐East Asia: Geography on the Ascendancy

This paper examines the recent revival of agrarian studies in the social science scholarship of South‐East Asia following a period of decline from the 1980s onward. The hiatus provides an opportunity to examine the changed empirical contexts and theoretical framings of agrarian change in the intervening period. Renewed interest in rural agricultural and social change is also marked by a disciplinary shift, with the centre of gravity moving away from anthropology and political science and towards a geographical focus. This is explained both by institutional factors, as a large international research programme based in (but not limited to) geography has taken the lead on the revival, and also by the substantive shift in agrarian studies away from narrowly local village ethnographies or broad‐based scholarship inspired by Cold War concerns, towards a multi‐scale and contextualised approach in which environment, globalisation, migration, territorial expansion, spatial inequality, and other key geographical themes have framed explorations of agrarian change.     

Fannie Lou Hamer's Freedom Farms and Black Agrarian Geographies

This paper examines Fannie Lou Hamer's Freedom Farms, a 1969 farming cooperative in Sunflower County, Mississippi. Specifically, this paper interrogates how Hamer's identity as a Black southern woman influences her formulation and daily activities at Freedom Farms. Theoretically, this paper situates Hamer as an expert agrarian labourer and knowledge producer who exists within a history of Black women who have always been utilised for their agrarian knowledge, but given little credit. Hamer's knowledge is a part of her body. This paper argues that Freedom Farms is a Black radical geography operating at three scales: the body, the farm and the southern agrarian landscape. This paper utilises Hamer's speeches, interviews and other archival documents to understand Hamer's efforts. Hamer's agrarian landscape is wrought with pain, but also the insistence in the economic opportunity that exists for Black people in agrarian spaces.     

An interdisciplinary approach to the understanding of past settlement and farming: two cases from SE Norway

An interdisciplinary approach involving analysis of plant macrofossils, pollen and soil micro morphology in combination with large-scale stripping of top soil, was applied in order to get a comprehensive understanding of pre-historic settlement, farming economy and land-use in Østfold, SE Norway. Investigations of 25 sites lead to two distinctive results: 1) A time-space perspective on usages of plants, and 2) Identification of agrarian activities in a relict field. Studies of these topics have hitherto been limited for this region. The results add fresh and essential knowledge to pre-historic times in Østfold and make a significant contribution to the understanding to these topics in neighbouring regions.     

The Icelandic medieval monastic garden - did it exist?

In the multidisciplinary project presented here, 12 known monastic grounds in Iceland were surveyed by a group of medievalists from different fields in the summers of 2009, 2010 and 2011. The aim of the survey was to increase knowledge of the Icelandic monastic garden and of the plants that were known and used there; to look for possible medieval cultural relict plants; to observe continental influence on the island; and to vitalize discussion and research. Landscape and plants were surveyed at the 12 monastic sites, and full botanical investigations made. Many of the plants found have a medieval past as medicinal and utility plants, and some of their properties may have been common knowledge to medieval Icelanders. An investigation of written sources and archaeological and archaeobotanical findings from excavated sites added to the investigators’ knowledge. So were there monastic gardens in Iceland in the Middle Ages? The answer is a rather confident yes. With all the evidence combined, the investigators were able to trace the deliberate use of medicinal, food and utility plants in the monastic contexts. Whether they were cultivated, tended in situ, gathered growing wild or imported is another matter. Continental influence was more evident than has previously been observed.     

The Urban Village,Agrarian Transformation,and Rentier Capitalism in Gurgaon,India

Gurgaon, India's “millennium city”, is today synonymous with India's embrace of global real estate capital and private sector‐led urban development. This paper asserts that Gurgaon's spectacular urbanisation has been fundamentally underpinned by an uneven process of land acquisition, exemption and agrarian transformation. Shifting away from dispossession‐centred analyses of contemporary urbanisation in India, this paper explores Gurgaon's “urban villages” to consider the uneven integration of agrarian classes into emerging urban real estate markets. Through an examination of differential experiences of land acquisition and agrarian social change among Gurgaon's landowning classes, the paper seeks to trace complex and nonlinear processes of agrarian transformation which make possible landscapes of global accumulation.     

Prohibido Tocar Este Cenote: The Archaeological Basis for the Titles of Ebtun

Ebtun, Kaua, Cuncunul, Tekom, and Tixcacalcupul are a group of related communities on the Yucatán peninsula described in the corpus of Maya-language documents known as The Titles of Ebtun. In this paper I explore transformations in agrarian practice and material expressions of identity after the Spanish invasion by analyzing archaeological variation in the life histories of places over the last 500 years. As new plants, animals, and technologies were adopted, landscape organization changed, and locales took on new meanings. Ebtun’s landscape reflects a historically contingent process that has transformed place and identity, fostering autonomy of cultural practice and renewal of tradition.     

“Masters in Our Native Place”: The politics of Latvian national parks on the road from Communism to “Europe”

On May 1, 2004, eight formerly Communist countries in Central and Eastern Europe consummated their long-desired “return to Europe” by joining the European Union (EU). While popular perceptions of the east European environment center on nightmarish images of pollution hotspots, Communism also bequeathed a wealth of relatively untouched nature that supports far more biological diversity than can be found in Western Europe. The enlargement represents a biodiversity bonanza for the EU, but millions of humans inhabit the post-Communist countryside, too, tending cultural landscapes rich with local and national meanings. EU accession has thus raised profound questions about post-Communist nature management. Should priority be given to biodiversity conservation at the continental scale, or to maintaining peopled landscapes and traditional land-use patterns? This article examines the confrontation between global and local understandings of nature through a case study of two Western-supported initiatives in national park management in Latvia in the late 1990s. Some Latvians, seeing hope for national development only through an internationalist embrace of globalization and regional integration, appropriated the Western narratives of biodiversity and rural economic diversification. But others resisted these narratives as threatening to agrarian notions of the value of rural landscapes: notions rooted in a potent agrarian discourse of national identity. What internationalists saw as a savvy embrace of the globalization of nature, agrarians denounced as a sort of self-imposed neo-colonialism.     

The French moment of the American national identity. St. John de Crèvecoeur's agrarian myth

The aim of this essay is to return to the genesis of the American agrarian myth in the eighteenth century, as a path to investigate the origins of the American national identity. This will be done by means of a comprehensive reassessment of St. John de Crèvecoeur, the Norman noble whose name is bound to the success of Letters from an American Farmer. His work contains the origins of the agrarian ideal as a peculiarly American phenomenon, prior to independence and before Republican ideology placed agrarian democracy at its foundations, making the project of agrarian development and democratic participation inseparable one from another. A Frenchman who became American and then, after 25 years, French again, Crèvecoeur represents an ideal lens through which to analyse the hitherto insufficiently explored contribution of French economic culture to the creation of American national identity. As a multi-faceted figure whose richness has been dominated by his image as the author of a best-selling autobiographical novel, Crèvecoeur is here also seen (partly through unpublished sources) as an agronomist who was no stranger to physiocracy and as a diplomat and French intellectual who always felt profoundly American. It was precisely this attachment to the land, seen as fundamental to the vision of a new and distinct form of peaceful cohabitation and democratic partnership, that became a political theme and an economic development project of the new nation and, as such, was a main plank of the agrarian ideology of Thomas Jefferson's Republicans.     

Faunal exploitation and agricultural transitions in the South American agricultural limit

The southern Mendoza Province of Argentina constitutes the southernmost limit of Andean agriculture in South America. Archaeofaunal assemblages from sites in this region show a pattern of changing taxonomic diversity concomitant with the first appearance of domesticated plants. This pattern is characterised by an increase in prey diversity before the appearance of the first cultigens and a decrease in diversity after their arrival. Furthermore, the animal taxa exploited when domesticated plants entered the diet indicate a focus on big game. The pattern observed in southern Mendoza is in accord with ethnographic and archaeological models generated by faunal research worldwide. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Poverty and Agrarian‐Forest Interactions in Thailand

In this paper we address the often sterile and circular debates over relationships between poverty and deforestation. These debates revolve around questions of whether forest loss causes poverty or poverty contributes to forest encroachment, and questions of whether it is loss of access to forests or dependence on forest‐based livelihoods that cause poverty. We suggest that a way beyond the impasse is to set such debates within the context of agrarian change. Livelihoods of those who live in or near forests depend considerably on a rapidly changing agriculture, yet agrarian contexts receive only background attention in popular, political and academic discourse over poverty and forests. Moreover, to the extent that agriculture is considered, little heed is paid to social, technical and economic change. We therefore address agriculture's changing relationships with the wider economy, otherwise referred to as the agrarian transition, and with the natural resource base on which it depends. The paper draws on the experience of Thailand to illustrate our key argument, and more specifically addresses the situation on the resource periphery through a look at the agriculture‐forest interface.     

Molding maize: the shaping of a crop diversity landscape in the western highlands of Guatemala

Today's domesticated plants not only embody past human–nature interactions, but also reflect social history. Human seed exchange, replacement and loss are important forces in shaping crop diversity. This essay explores regional history in relation to the shaping of maize diversity in the western highlands of Guatemala. This is an area of exceptional maize heterogeneity and a peripheral part of the region where maize was domesticated. Maize diversity seems to have developed through geographic isolation in networks of seed exchange that were generally very local in scope. However, recent studies on Mexican maize suggest otherwise. However, few studies have examined crop diversity or seed exchange from a historical perspective. A closer examination of regional history suggests which processes might be important for shaping the present geographical distribution of maize diversity. Seeds were occasionally transported over longer distances. As a consequence, maize diversity is geographically not characterised by sharp differences between farming communities; the main differences are to be found in regional occurrences. This challenges antimodern ideas of closed, local native ecologies. Consequently, the conservation of maize genetic resources is a challenge, but not entirely contradictory with its transforming socio-economic context.     

Socionatures,Space, and Decolonisation: Amílcar Cabral's Praxis of Dialectics

The agronomic writings of influential theorist and independence leader Amílcar Cabral contain a hitherto underappreciated dialectical approach that is environmental, nonreductive, spatialised, nonteleological, and anticolonial, with significance for geographies that are simultaneously critical, physical, Southern, Black, African, and decolonial. Cabral's interests in socionatures—and especially colonialism and the state—emerged from childhood in colonial Cabo Verde. His undergraduate thesis examines dialectics of soil erosion and agrarian structures in Portugal, amidst his politicisation and anti-colonial networking. He developed his dialectical approach spatially as he conducted Guinea-Bissau's agricultural census and advanced beyond methodological nationalism and evolutionary stagism by emphasising colonial connections (colonial state mechanisation and export crops in African agrarian systems). These insights and concerns shaped and were shaped by his work on warehouses, Angolan plantations, and broader post-1960 liberation struggles to suggest that a rural guerrilla strategy was possible and necessary in Guinea through dialectical engagements with diverse peasantries and international support.     

The agrarian working class put somewhat centre stage: an often neglected group of workers in the historiography of labour in state-socialist Hungary

This study discusses a body of scholarship which is little-known internationally, written in Hungary in the period between 1949 and 1989: the historiography on agrarian labour from the eighteenth century to the Second World War. This historiography was conceptually inclusive in that it explored the history of many groups of agrarian workers, the varied types of labour in which they were involved, including long-term contracts, day and servant labour, seasonal migration and non-agricultural forms of labour, the role of agrarian labour in socio-economic development, and the political movement of ‘agrarian socialism’. This historiography for a large part remained embedded in three adjacent research clusters: peasant studies, local and regional history, and the history of the labour movement. This study argues that scholarly approaches and interests, and institutional framings specific to each of these clusters, were of key importance in generating the extensive scholarship that is reviewed. The fact that Hungary had been a dominantly agrarian country before 1945, the Leninist vision of the ‘alliance of the workers and the peasants’ that was to bring about socialism in Eastern Europe and the state-condoned interest in the history of the labour movement and labour more generally were other important factors conducive to, and to various degrees putting their stamp on, this research. Given its findings within a Marxian or classical social-history framing, and its focus on an often neglected group of workers, the historiography on agrarian labour written in state-socialist Hungary deserves to be integrated into the historiographical canon. This study discusses this scholarship against the backdrop of present-day global labour history. In pointing to some of its area-, time- and context-specific characteristics, the study aims to contribute to a global dialogue in labour history that is sensitive to and critically appreciative of different historiographical trajectories and traditions across world regions.     

Ordinary Geographies: Care,Violence, and Agrarian Extractivism in “Post-Conflict” Colombia

In Colombia’s agrarian spaces, war and extractivism are deeply entangled. Almost four years after the peace accords signed between the national government and the FARC guerrilla, post-conflict geographies are best characterised by the ongoing dispossession of local populations related to the entrenchment of extractivism. Drawing from ethnographic work carried out in the Colombian Caribbean on the ordinary practices and spaces of social reproduction, the ordinary geographies, this article explores gendered practices of care and their role in both sustaining and disrupting paramilitary violence and agrarian extractivism. The focus not just on the gendered effects of war and extractivism, but on gender’s constitutive role in the configuration of these processes and dynamics, allows us to contribute to recent literature on extractivism, dispossession and violence from a feminist standpoint.     

Unequal Access to Payments for Ecosystem Services: The Case of Costa Rica

Using Costa Rica's experience with its payments for ecosystem services (PES) programme, this article examines how and why some groups come to be excluded from participating in the programme. It demonstrates that Costa Rica's PES programme results in payments that generally go to larger landowners and tend to exclude certain kinds of smallholders, and that these patterns occur despite concerted state efforts to include the rural poor. The author argues that access exclusions found in PES are the result of historical patterns of agrarian settlement interacting with the state's inability to recognize certain forms of property claims in the context of PES, with the latter condition emerging through ongoing efforts to transform the administration of the nation's property regime in ways that will render it more legible to markets. This case study shows the importance of understanding how access restrictions emerge from the complex relations between multiple state institutions and agrarian producers in the implementation of PES.     

印度绿色革命国外研究:路径、观点和问题

在国际学术界,印度的绿色革命成了多门社会科学研究的对象。国际学术界对印度绿色革命的研究通常采取反思的方式,即在与经济、社会和政治发展的联系当中去考察印度的绿色革命问题。本文详细介绍了他们的研究路径、问题和观点,指出农业转型研究构成了国外学术界相关研究中的一个重要面向。但是,他们没有把农业转型当作农业现代化的方式来看待。笔者认为,这是他们在考察印度农业转型时存在的根本问题,而从这样一种新的观点出发去考察印度的农业转型还是一件尚待完成的工作。     

Desiccated plant macrofossils from the medieval castle of Marmorera,Switzerland, with a note on the identification of leaves of Cyperaceae

Abstract

During restoration work at the medieval castle of Marmorera, Graubünden canton, Switzerland, numerous desiccated plant remains were found — in a rock crevice that was protected from precipitation by a massive rock shelter. The identification of the remains showed that the majority could not have grown at the castle, but must have been transported to the site. Many of the plants came from warmer climates and were imported from lower lying regions, indicating the position of the castle at an important transalpine route. Among the finds was a lump of grass-like leaves for which for a method of preparation and identification was developed. The leaves turned out to be of Carex species that grow in wet habitats which were probably used as litter or as bedding material.