Fieldwork data from Italy shows an ethic of care being put into action by a highly diverse set of actors representing a complex and pluralistic demographic profile. This suggests a certain universalism in the ethic, challenging an explicitly gendered view such as Shiva’s. It may be the case, then, that superimposing a ‘feminine principle’ on alternative agriculture is simply an attempt to claim for feminist theory an ontologically independent array of practices.
Bjorkhaug’s (2006: 27) survey of Norwegian conventional and organic farmers collates a wide spectrum of attitudes and degrees of care, without any absolute gender distinction:
The analysis has shown that female organic farmers expressing traditionally feminine values can be placed at one end of an attitudinal scale and male conventional
farmers expressing more typically masculine values at the other end. In the centre of the scale farmers negotiate and interpret their roles and identities, with
conventional female farmers expressing femininity in flux (Brandth, 1994) and male organic farmers exhibiting feminine values through dialogic masculinity (Peter et al., 2000).
Back-to-the-landers in Italy expressed a range of views that both support and contradict the notion of alternative agriculture as imbued with feminine principles. Certainly the notion of care for the environment was paramount in the stated reasons for farming organically among both questionnaire respondents and interviewees. Asked to rank their motivations for deciding to farm organically, over half of all respondents to the WWOOF host questionnaire put ‘concern for the environment/ecology’ as their foremost concern. Health and food quality ranked second and third respectively, while nearly 90% of respondents listed profitability as the least important factor. Private conversations and interviews with both male and female
back-to-the-landers largely correspond to the survey results, with a couple of notable exceptions. One female farmer, asked if she had ever considered non-organic agriculture, responded:
No, it would always be organic… basically for the simple reason that you are not competitive otherwise. You have to offer something which gives added value to the product, because you’re producing in a much more expensive way than other farms than what intensive farmers in the flatlands can produce… Of course you’re also convinced because you want to live in a healthy environment… But economically speaking it’s necessary to be organic.
Interestingly, my own experience of working on this farm stands out as imparting a weak sense of care or nurture. My field journal describes some surprise and frustration early in the stay:
Not made to feel particularly welcome here. I guess this the inevitable impact of [the host couple] having hosted hundreds of WWOOFers over the years... [The
female farmer] seems nice enough, not a fundamentally indecent person, but is just too preoccupied to be more than cold and distracted most of the time... I haven’t learned anything, just taken orders. It definitely feels like I’m working rather than
‘volunteering’ or ‘collaborating’ as the WWOOF ethic would have it.
A few months after my week-long stay, I learned that this farm had been suspended from WWOOF after the organisation received three complaints about it from other WWOOFers. It has since been re-instated, conditional upon promised improvements to its treatment of volunteers. Only one other farmer gave an indication that self-interest superseded other concerns in his enterprise. A former lawyer from Bolzano in the far north of Italy with whom I volunteered plainly stated that his passion is more focused on his agriturismo5 than the organic horticulture practiced on the property. He grows organic vegetables for the on-site restaurant and lavender plants to make massage oil for the therapy suite available to agriturismo guests.
His reasons for producing organically are not so much cynical as simply strategic. He claims that he needs to meet the minimum requirements for running an officially recognised organic agriturismo to qualify for tax breaks and restoration subsidies, and so produces to these standards. ‘Of course it’s nice to not use chemicals,’ he says, ‘and many organic farms around
5 An agriturismo is a bed and breakfast service on a working farm. Subsidies and tax breaks are available for agriturismi as part of Italy’s plan to diversify the rural economy in line with post-productivist EU objectives. To qualify for government assistance, one must meet certain standards (number of hectares cultivated, etc.) to prove that the primary function of the site is agriculture. Italians often complain that regulators are easily deceived.
here are very beautiful. But for me it’s just something I have to do. I don’t want to get into the politics of organic and non-organic... This is just what I do to keep the agriturismo.’
These examples are brought to attention only for their deviation from the typically expressed concerns of back-to-the-landers. For both men and women, an ethic of care is cited as a primary reason for their entering agriculture and choosing to farm organically, as reflected in the quotes in section 6.2. Based on the overall consistency of replies among interviewees - of both sexes, interviewed independently or as couples – I am not confident that stable conclusions can be drawn as to whether the ethics embraced by back-to-the-landers have a strongly gendered dimension. Bjorkhaug’s (2006) study uses a relatively objective method of measuring attitudes with attention to gender difference, but is of course dependent on subjective interpretations of ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ principles. These interpretations carry significant risks of essentialism. The idea of women as leading a more harmonious existence with nature has faced critiques for its essentialism (cf. MacCormack and Strathern, 1980), with scholars arguing that notions of both nature and gender are too culturally contingent to be universal.6 More empirical substance, in my view, may be derived from studying the effects of agricultural practice – as opposed to initial motivators - on individual identities.
Later chapters will explore how the material act of food production and the strategic mobilisation of natural processes contribute to the attainment of this power. How it is then channelled into broader political projects – a process also contingent upon cultural and spatio-temporal dynamics - will become the subject of further analysis. This section has sought to lay some groundwork for making critical observations about back-to-the-land farms as gendered spaces, with theoretical support drawn from empirical studies conducted in several global regions. This reflects the lack of contemporary research specifically relating to women farmers in Italy and the gendered dimensions of back-to-the-land migration, but also interrogates the universality of certain values and supposedly gendered principles. The ‘agrarian dream’
6 Strathern’s (1980) anthropological study of the Hagen of Papua New Guinea, for example, reveals much fluidity in the linguistic gendering of terms related to nature, culture and social values. In Hagen society, nature and culture as feminine, masculine or neutered are dependent on situational context. She concludes: ‘Neither male nor female can possibly stand for “humanity” against “nature” because the distinction between them is used to evaluate areas in which human action is creative and individuating... Representations of domination and influence between the sexes are precisely about ways of human interaction, and not also about humanity’s project in relation to a less than human
(Trauger, 2007) of back-to-the-land migration has considerable cross-cultural and inter-generational pull, and therefore demands a degree of scepticism when general claims about issues such as class and gender are made. The evidence presented in this chapter suggests that the applicability of certain speculations is highly sensitive to the experiences of particular individuals. As I argue in the next section, this holds true for socio-economic class as well as gender.