Polycultures of the Mind - Organic Farmers in Québec and the Recovery of Agency

Ph.D. Thesis (2008) by Mary Richardson
Department of Anthropology
Faculty of Social Sciences
Université Laval, Québec

Abstract
Agriculture and food are at the crux of virtually all of the most pressing environmental issues facing human societies today. While the power of large corporations, free trade agreements and an industrial model of agriculture can seem crushing, resistance movements contest that power and strive to forge alternatives in contexts where power in its varied guises constantly re-appropriates the spaces they create.

Organic agriculture is one such social movement that has cleared a space for an alternative model of food production, a space that is growing larger each day.

This study focuses attention on organic farming in Québec (Canada) where ethnographic research was conducted with organic farmers from a wide range of backgrounds and involved in raising a diversity of plants and animals for food and medicine (livestock, dairy, field crops, market gardens, grain, herbs and maple syrup).

Organic farmers bring together perspectives from the 1960s counter-culture, from New Age and Eastern spiritualities, from mainstream and traditional agriculture and from contemporary neo-peasant movements among the younger generations. The livelihoods they cultivate (often, but not always, at the intellectual, economic and social margins of society) embody alternative understandings of social relations, wealth and place.

A striking feature of organic farming practices and epistemologies is their recognition of the importance of human and non-human relations and agency, and their emphasis on recovering agency, both for themselves as farmers and for the non-humans who are mobilised in the organic agriculture network. As such, they recognise the intentionality of other life forms and strive for attentiveness to the messages they convey, thus emphasising respect, relationship and responsiveness as fundamental principles for living and farming.

Organic farmers therefore propose new ways of apprehending and engaging with the myriad life forms that inhabit local environments—while also making a living by marketing organic produce.

Organic farmers provide a fascinating example of how ecological knowledge is constructed, re-constructed and disseminated through the actions of individuals, groups and organisations as they draw connections between diverse ways of knowing. Organic farmers are re-creating local knowledge on various elements of the living environment by reviving traditional knowledge, developing new knowledge in light of scientific research and constructing their own embodied forms of knowledge through experimentation, observation, intuition and trial-and-error. Their understandings are thus experiential and place-based, grounded in the body, in particular ecosystems and in socio-economic contexts ranging from their local communities to global trade networks.

As they develop alternative agricultural practices and disseminate new (and old) understandings of the agro-ecosystem, organic farmers are re-inventing relational ways of knowing and being that take account of complexity, diversity and holism.

This relational ontology implies that humans, rather than speaking of a distanced nature “out there,” relate to the myriad entities within the ecosystem and recognise their agency in creating the inhabited world, or biotic community. As an embodied practice firmly rooted in what has been called the “middle landscape” between densely inhabited urban environments and what many view as wilderness, organic farmers seek a fertile encounter between human societies, animals and environments where all can co-exist. In doing so, their project may well be part of restoring the sense of aesthetic unity that Batson says is the grounds for a concept of the sacred.

As organic farmers struggle to articulate an ethics based on respect for, responsiveness to and relationship with non-humans (though this is not always a conscious goal) they are moving away from a separative, or fragmentary, paradigm for understanding the world towards a holistic one grounded in a recognition of relationship and connection. This shift may participate in the emergence of a new form of sacred ecology in concert with other non-dualistic worldviews currently coming out of a wide array of fields and endeavours.

 

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Posted September 2008