Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2010
This article analyses local agricultural shows in the Scottish Borders and the way their composit... more This article analyses local agricultural shows in the Scottish Borders and the way their composition and enactment relate to and reference the local farming communities that organize and host them. The context of these shows includes the ways in which depopulation, decline of local institutions, and withdrawal of local government services provide challenges to the existence and vitality of local communities in the Borders. The shows are conceptualized as public events with a logic of design consisting of three dimensions: an overall framing as festival; a ramified structure of nested sets of activities each differentially transposing the community's social ethos and iconic activities into the show; and a chronological incorporative structure of enactment in which the experiences and meanings of each set of activities are incorporated into successive sets. They provide a strategy for a fine-grained analysis of public events more generally, and of the impact on participants' experience of an event, and on the social world it references. Every Saturday from mid-August to early October, there is a least one agricultural show organized and hosted by a local farming community in the Scottish Borders. 1 In a festival atmosphere, people attending the shows participate in a variety of activities: exhibiting and judging of locally made cakes, jams, needlework, and handicrafts, locally grown vegetables, and locally bred sheep and pet dogs; trailing competitions for regionally bred hounds; children's games, entertainment, and the conviviality of food and bar facilities. Unlike their county, regional, and national counterparts in the UK (Holloway 2003), these shows are local in scale and concrete in significance. 2 They are, for the organizers and participants, the strongest existing presentation, symptom, and practice of their rural communities, whose existence and vitality have been challenged over the past three decades by EU agricultural policy, depopulation, and withdrawal of institutions and services by county and state authorities. As public events (see Handelman 1998: 10-17), they are structured compositions through which organizers give form to and bring into 'focal awareness' (Polanyi 1962: 55) their largely tacit and inchoate experience of community and a processual enactment through which local people collectively practise their community at the same time as they display its vitality to others.
This article is the result of six-months field research work among the former refugee Bhutanese c... more This article is the result of six-months field research work among the former refugee Bhutanese community in a suburb of Adelaide (South Australia) with the goal of describing and analysing food habits in the context of resettlement. Research data has shown a preference by the elder generations for traditional Nepali food and a refusal of Australian food. For the Nepali-speaking Bhutanese, food practices in the context of immigration represent a sensuous and embodied activity, connected to the memory of the place they once belonged to, but also the essential medium for the creation of new rituals which reinforce their identity as both Nepali and Australian. By underlining the importance of food within Nepali traditional rituals and, on the other hand, the role of food in the process of memory building, we discuss here how food practices represent an essential part of both pre-existing and new rituals, able to reinforce social and cultural identity.
The epigraph is part of a longer poem, Cross Roads, composed by Tim Douglas, a hill sheep farmer ... more The epigraph is part of a longer poem, Cross Roads, composed by Tim Douglas, a hill sheep farmer and well-known local poet of the Scottish borders. It was written in response to the British General Elections held on 28 February 1974 in which the Scottish National Party (SNP) polled twentytwo percent of the vote in Scotland but won only seven of the seventy-one Scottish seats. In notes accompanying the poem he wrote that sixteen seats would have been 'a fair share'. The Scotland-wide electoral recognition of the SNP and resurgence of 'The Scottish Question', i.e. of Scotland's place in the British state, continued the momentum of the earlier and surprising by-election of 1967 in which SNP took the seat of Hamilton in Lanarkshire-one of the Labour Party's safest-with 46 percent of the vote (see Devine 2000:574). The poem and several others, written between 1970 and 1986, are persuasions and reflections upon the contemporary ambiguities of the identity of Scotland as a separate but subordinate nation and whether its destiny lay in Home Rule, i.e. remaining within the United Kingdom but with in its own devolved Parliament in Edinburgh, or in self government as a separate state. As Caton suggests in his study of poetry in Yemen, a debate over national identity and status, such as that occurring in Scotland throughout the latter decades of the twentieth century, is a context of social reconstruction in which art can play an active part in the 'emergence [rather than just the reproduction] of culture in social action ' (1990:260-1) My aim in the paper is to analyse a subset Douglas' poems, those composed about Scotland and its identity-an identity that in his poems consists of two dimensions: a 'cultural' dimension based upon and reflected by a distinctive history, landscape, weather, language, sporting teams, economics and a taste for whisky; and a political dimension based upon relations between the Scottish nation and United Kingdom state. I treat these poems as both artistic and social practice in that they entail 'both the creation of art and the production of social and political reality in the same act of composition' (Caton 1990:21). The social and political reality they fashion is characterised by multifaceted, multi-level ironies: the situational irony of the incongruous political circumstances of Scotland as a separate nation
A central aim of the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) since its inception in the... more A central aim of the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) since its inception in the 1970s has been to sustain rural society, the landscape and the environment, particularly those areas with less favourable production conditions-that is, land with poor productivity, low production and declining populations. Since 2003, the European Union's CAP has undergone two major reforms, the aim of which is to ensure the vitality and sustainability of rural communities. The first focuses on market-related support and direct aid to farmers for agriculture, including the Less Favoured Area Support Scheme. The second focuses on broader rural development including diversification of economic activities and stewardship for the environment. The aim of this chapter is to trace changes in rural land use and landscapes on hill sheep farms that result from the policy effect of the CAP: the dialectic evolution of the concept of rurality embedded in the European Union's CAP and the rural landscapes shaped and used by hill sheep farmers in the Scottish borderlands.
The theme of this paper is the family farm and the problems of defining it. The approach taken is... more The theme of this paper is the family farm and the problems of defining it. The approach taken is to recognize the difference between theoretical definitional practices of sociologists and anthropologists, on the one hand, and everyday definitional practices of family farmers on the other. The former focus upon observable behaviour and/or quantitative measures that are used to construct an analytical concept with precise boundaries; the latter arc not interested in defining the boundaries of the concept of the family farm but in understanding the nature and operations of their family farms so that they can reproduce them in their everyday activities. They attend to what is most central and ideal to the family farm and this is the basis of their concept of the family farm. Through an ethnographic account of hill sheep farms in the Scottish borderlands, the paper argues that the essence of family farms is a consubstantial relation between family and farm such that the distinct existence and form of both partake of or become united in a common substance that is transmitted over generations. The analysis highlights the economic and social interdependence of family and farm, the process by which the farm becomes embodied through family labour, the strategies adopted by the family to ensure the transfer of the farm to the following generation, and the use of a genetic metaphor to transpose a legal relation between family and farm into a consubstantial one.
This paper shifts the focus of definitional debates about the nature of rurality from the academi... more This paper shifts the focus of definitional debates about the nature of rurality from the academic field to an agricultural field that includes the European Community, its Common Agricultural Policy and farmers whose lives and livelihoods are significantly entailed by it. It traces the evolution of the Common Agricultural Policy, the concepts of rurality embedded with it and the mediated effects of this policy on farming people and their practices. Ethnographic material about hill sheep farmers of the Borders Region of Scotland is used to illustrate the ‘policy-effect’ (a term derived from Bourdieu's notion of ‘theory effect’) of the Common Agricultural Policy: the definitions of and policies for rural spaces devised by the European Community in its Common Agricultural Policy set the conditions for hill sheep farmers to produce in their practices a version of the rurality represented in the CAP; and the CAP records these mediated effects of its policy in its analysis of the nature of rural spaces within the European Community for which it has to devise further policies.
A central aim of the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) since its inception in the... more A central aim of the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) since its inception in the 1970s has been to sustain rural society, the landscape and the environment, particularly those areas with less favourable production conditions-that is, land with poor productivity, low production and declining populations. Since 2003, the European Union's CAP has undergone two major reforms, the aim of which is to ensure the vitality and sustainability of rural communities. The first focuses on market-related support and direct aid to farmers for agriculture, including the Less Favoured Area Support Scheme. The second focuses on broader rural development including diversification of economic activities and stewardship for the environment. The aim of this chapter is to trace changes in rural land use and landscapes on hill sheep farms that result from the policy effect of the CAP: the dialectic evolution of the concept of rurality embedded in the European Union's CAP and the rural landscapes shaped and used by hill sheep farmers in the Scottish borderlands.
This article analyses local agricultural shows in the Scottish Borders and the way their composit... more This article analyses local agricultural shows in the Scottish Borders and the way their composition and enactment relate to and reference the local farming communities that organize and host them. The context of these shows includes the ways in which depopulation, decline of local institutions, and withdrawal of local government services provide challenges to the existence and vitality of local communities in the Borders. The shows are conceptualized as public events with a logic of design consisting of three dimensions: an overall framing as festival; a ramified structure of nested sets of activities each differentially transposing the community's social ethos and iconic activities into the show; and a chronological incorporative structure of enactment in which the experiences and meanings of each set of activities are incorporated into successive sets. They provide a strategy for a fine-grained analysis of public events more generally, and of the impact on participants' experience of an event, and on the social world it references.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2010
This article analyses local agricultural shows in the Scottish Borders and the way their composit... more This article analyses local agricultural shows in the Scottish Borders and the way their composition and enactment relate to and reference the local farming communities that organize and host them. The context of these shows includes the ways in which depopulation, decline of local institutions, and withdrawal of local government services provide challenges to the existence and vitality of local communities in the Borders. The shows are conceptualized as public events with a logic of design consisting of three dimensions: an overall framing as festival; a ramified structure of nested sets of activities each differentially transposing the community's social ethos and iconic activities into the show; and a chronological incorporative structure of enactment in which the experiences and meanings of each set of activities are incorporated into successive sets. They provide a strategy for a fine-grained analysis of public events more generally, and of the impact on participants' experience of an event, and on the social world it references. Every Saturday from mid-August to early October, there is a least one agricultural show organized and hosted by a local farming community in the Scottish Borders. 1 In a festival atmosphere, people attending the shows participate in a variety of activities: exhibiting and judging of locally made cakes, jams, needlework, and handicrafts, locally grown vegetables, and locally bred sheep and pet dogs; trailing competitions for regionally bred hounds; children's games, entertainment, and the conviviality of food and bar facilities. Unlike their county, regional, and national counterparts in the UK (Holloway 2003), these shows are local in scale and concrete in significance. 2 They are, for the organizers and participants, the strongest existing presentation, symptom, and practice of their rural communities, whose existence and vitality have been challenged over the past three decades by EU agricultural policy, depopulation, and withdrawal of institutions and services by county and state authorities. As public events (see Handelman 1998: 10-17), they are structured compositions through which organizers give form to and bring into 'focal awareness' (Polanyi 1962: 55) their largely tacit and inchoate experience of community and a processual enactment through which local people collectively practise their community at the same time as they display its vitality to others.
This article is the result of six-months field research work among the former refugee Bhutanese c... more This article is the result of six-months field research work among the former refugee Bhutanese community in a suburb of Adelaide (South Australia) with the goal of describing and analysing food habits in the context of resettlement. Research data has shown a preference by the elder generations for traditional Nepali food and a refusal of Australian food. For the Nepali-speaking Bhutanese, food practices in the context of immigration represent a sensuous and embodied activity, connected to the memory of the place they once belonged to, but also the essential medium for the creation of new rituals which reinforce their identity as both Nepali and Australian. By underlining the importance of food within Nepali traditional rituals and, on the other hand, the role of food in the process of memory building, we discuss here how food practices represent an essential part of both pre-existing and new rituals, able to reinforce social and cultural identity.
The epigraph is part of a longer poem, Cross Roads, composed by Tim Douglas, a hill sheep farmer ... more The epigraph is part of a longer poem, Cross Roads, composed by Tim Douglas, a hill sheep farmer and well-known local poet of the Scottish borders. It was written in response to the British General Elections held on 28 February 1974 in which the Scottish National Party (SNP) polled twentytwo percent of the vote in Scotland but won only seven of the seventy-one Scottish seats. In notes accompanying the poem he wrote that sixteen seats would have been 'a fair share'. The Scotland-wide electoral recognition of the SNP and resurgence of 'The Scottish Question', i.e. of Scotland's place in the British state, continued the momentum of the earlier and surprising by-election of 1967 in which SNP took the seat of Hamilton in Lanarkshire-one of the Labour Party's safest-with 46 percent of the vote (see Devine 2000:574). The poem and several others, written between 1970 and 1986, are persuasions and reflections upon the contemporary ambiguities of the identity of Scotland as a separate but subordinate nation and whether its destiny lay in Home Rule, i.e. remaining within the United Kingdom but with in its own devolved Parliament in Edinburgh, or in self government as a separate state. As Caton suggests in his study of poetry in Yemen, a debate over national identity and status, such as that occurring in Scotland throughout the latter decades of the twentieth century, is a context of social reconstruction in which art can play an active part in the 'emergence [rather than just the reproduction] of culture in social action ' (1990:260-1) My aim in the paper is to analyse a subset Douglas' poems, those composed about Scotland and its identity-an identity that in his poems consists of two dimensions: a 'cultural' dimension based upon and reflected by a distinctive history, landscape, weather, language, sporting teams, economics and a taste for whisky; and a political dimension based upon relations between the Scottish nation and United Kingdom state. I treat these poems as both artistic and social practice in that they entail 'both the creation of art and the production of social and political reality in the same act of composition' (Caton 1990:21). The social and political reality they fashion is characterised by multifaceted, multi-level ironies: the situational irony of the incongruous political circumstances of Scotland as a separate nation
A central aim of the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) since its inception in the... more A central aim of the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) since its inception in the 1970s has been to sustain rural society, the landscape and the environment, particularly those areas with less favourable production conditions-that is, land with poor productivity, low production and declining populations. Since 2003, the European Union's CAP has undergone two major reforms, the aim of which is to ensure the vitality and sustainability of rural communities. The first focuses on market-related support and direct aid to farmers for agriculture, including the Less Favoured Area Support Scheme. The second focuses on broader rural development including diversification of economic activities and stewardship for the environment. The aim of this chapter is to trace changes in rural land use and landscapes on hill sheep farms that result from the policy effect of the CAP: the dialectic evolution of the concept of rurality embedded in the European Union's CAP and the rural landscapes shaped and used by hill sheep farmers in the Scottish borderlands.
The theme of this paper is the family farm and the problems of defining it. The approach taken is... more The theme of this paper is the family farm and the problems of defining it. The approach taken is to recognize the difference between theoretical definitional practices of sociologists and anthropologists, on the one hand, and everyday definitional practices of family farmers on the other. The former focus upon observable behaviour and/or quantitative measures that are used to construct an analytical concept with precise boundaries; the latter arc not interested in defining the boundaries of the concept of the family farm but in understanding the nature and operations of their family farms so that they can reproduce them in their everyday activities. They attend to what is most central and ideal to the family farm and this is the basis of their concept of the family farm. Through an ethnographic account of hill sheep farms in the Scottish borderlands, the paper argues that the essence of family farms is a consubstantial relation between family and farm such that the distinct existence and form of both partake of or become united in a common substance that is transmitted over generations. The analysis highlights the economic and social interdependence of family and farm, the process by which the farm becomes embodied through family labour, the strategies adopted by the family to ensure the transfer of the farm to the following generation, and the use of a genetic metaphor to transpose a legal relation between family and farm into a consubstantial one.
This paper shifts the focus of definitional debates about the nature of rurality from the academi... more This paper shifts the focus of definitional debates about the nature of rurality from the academic field to an agricultural field that includes the European Community, its Common Agricultural Policy and farmers whose lives and livelihoods are significantly entailed by it. It traces the evolution of the Common Agricultural Policy, the concepts of rurality embedded with it and the mediated effects of this policy on farming people and their practices. Ethnographic material about hill sheep farmers of the Borders Region of Scotland is used to illustrate the ‘policy-effect’ (a term derived from Bourdieu's notion of ‘theory effect’) of the Common Agricultural Policy: the definitions of and policies for rural spaces devised by the European Community in its Common Agricultural Policy set the conditions for hill sheep farmers to produce in their practices a version of the rurality represented in the CAP; and the CAP records these mediated effects of its policy in its analysis of the nature of rural spaces within the European Community for which it has to devise further policies.
A central aim of the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) since its inception in the... more A central aim of the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) since its inception in the 1970s has been to sustain rural society, the landscape and the environment, particularly those areas with less favourable production conditions-that is, land with poor productivity, low production and declining populations. Since 2003, the European Union's CAP has undergone two major reforms, the aim of which is to ensure the vitality and sustainability of rural communities. The first focuses on market-related support and direct aid to farmers for agriculture, including the Less Favoured Area Support Scheme. The second focuses on broader rural development including diversification of economic activities and stewardship for the environment. The aim of this chapter is to trace changes in rural land use and landscapes on hill sheep farms that result from the policy effect of the CAP: the dialectic evolution of the concept of rurality embedded in the European Union's CAP and the rural landscapes shaped and used by hill sheep farmers in the Scottish borderlands.
This article analyses local agricultural shows in the Scottish Borders and the way their composit... more This article analyses local agricultural shows in the Scottish Borders and the way their composition and enactment relate to and reference the local farming communities that organize and host them. The context of these shows includes the ways in which depopulation, decline of local institutions, and withdrawal of local government services provide challenges to the existence and vitality of local communities in the Borders. The shows are conceptualized as public events with a logic of design consisting of three dimensions: an overall framing as festival; a ramified structure of nested sets of activities each differentially transposing the community's social ethos and iconic activities into the show; and a chronological incorporative structure of enactment in which the experiences and meanings of each set of activities are incorporated into successive sets. They provide a strategy for a fine-grained analysis of public events more generally, and of the impact on participants' experience of an event, and on the social world it references.
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