Culture Agriculture Food and Environment最新文献

This article explores the impacts of recent trends in yak farming on yak herding culture among the Brokpa of Merak and Sakteng in eastern Bhutan. It assesses the challenges experienced by herders in the context of climate variability and socioeconomic development. The data were collected through participant observation and semi-structured interviews with 20 Brokpa in Merak and Sakteng and through analysis of livestock census records of six consecutive years (2013–2018). The results of the study reveal a number of significant issues: a labor shortage resulting from Brokpa youths leaving villages for better job opportunities, overgrazing and shrinking of rangelands, and declining yak populations due to disease and predation. In addition, study respondents worried about the unpredictable displacement of Brokpa and a possible loss of identity as a result. Unless alternative policies and interventions are adopted to ensure the sustainability of yak farming and rangelands, the future of yak herding culture is uncertain.

School food programs across the United States are plagued by widespread criticism and face urgent calls for reform and public discourse has also become fixated upon “healthy” eating as a means to address a variety of child health problems. Scholars widely challenge the admonishment to eat “healthy” as laden with privilege and recognize the inherent, hegemonic whiteness of contemporary alternative food movements, but few studies have directly examined the relationship between race and school food programs. This paper draws on ethnographic research to unpack “healthy eating” through the perspective of elementary school students and shows how they challenge dominant narratives that assume kids do not like vegetables and expose the fallacy of nutrition education as the key to healthy eating. Through the performance of vegetable nutrition, kids critically engage with normative nutrition messages and begin to reveal a racialized consciousness of school food.

Anthropologists developed the lifeways construct to understand how communities make a way of life on certain landscapes. In this paper, we pair the lifeways construct with that of “lived experiences” to include processes of change in lifeways. Using a case study of farmers in Idaho's Eastern Snake Plain Aquifer region, we explore farmers' efforts to adapt to changes in agricultural water policy. Based on interviews with farmers, we identify several components of farmers' lifeways, including place-based identity, stewardship, trust in decision-makers, and financial well-being. Our findings suggest that the relationships between farmers and their landscapes are shifting as a result of water governance changes. When combined with dynamic global economic factors, ever-shifting regulatory and governance priorities and social-ecological changes are likely to continue producing new and interacting challenges to which farmers—and their lifeways—will need to adapt to survive.

High-altitude farmers in South Tyrol (Italy) live and work in the mountain belt of the Eastern Alps and are the focus of an ongoing research project on which first results are presented here. Located between 1200 and 1900 m above sea level, some of their farmsteads are among the highest in Western Europe. This historico-political development of the region accounts for the relatively favorable situation of these farmers. Since the 1970s, the regional government has regularly subsidized these smallholdings, to ensure that the farmers can remain on their land and market their produce. Keeping the mountain sites cultivated is crucial for ecological reasons but also for the tourist industry on which the region and its people depend heavily. How do farmers approach the apparent contradiction between self-sufficiency that lies at the core of their work, and, the resources that they need and receive from external agencies?

To problematize the idea of peasant autonomy in old capitalist societies, this paper will explore the evolution of two phenomena in present-day France: peasantry, commonly understood as relatively autonomous small family farms that rely on subsistence farming, and the neorural movement, that is, urban-to-rural migration that has a counter-cultural connotation. While peasantry is believed to be disappearing, the neorural movement is charged with “deradicalization” because it distances itself from subsistence farming. The juxtaposition of both phenomena shows that capitalism has transformed the countryside, making it difficult to live from agriculture. In old capitalist countries, peasant autonomy is no longer about subsistence farming but about achieving an economic equilibrium that increases autonomy from market pressures created by high input prices and low output values.