Böndernas agerande inför och anpassning till storskiftet i sydvästra Finland

This article examines peasants’ goals and means of negotiation in the reallocation of land or enclosure reform called storskifte in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century in Southwest Finland. It stresses the agency of peasants and their actions in the quest for best practices. The study is based on the meeting minutes of the storskifte reform of 230 villages with mainly freeholders or crown tenants as stakeholders. This article shows how peasants balanced between individualism and collectivism in their decision making because their goals were opposite. They aimed to increase the freedom of work and decision making in the household economy. At the same time, the cooperation with neighbours was an important method of decreasing the workload and costs of farming. Sources indicate that peasants made agreements with each other so they could combine both goals. They achieved independence as farmers as well as low costs by combining consolidation of land with mutual agreements about cooperation in specific issues, but they allowed each other to do individual decisions, too. This kind of flexible solution-seeking behaviour provides a new perspective on the discussion about peasants and agricultural change.

Ritual, Myth, and the Rise of “Greedy Rice”

This chapter studies the ritual conservation of archaic cultigens. Contemporary food-crop agriculture in the region is heavily focused on rice. But tribal mythology, supported by archaeological evidence, suggests that much grain cultivation was preceded by the cultivation of tubers, in particular taro. Myth and ritual depict this process of agricultural change as a contest, as political in effect; and indeed, the history of the development of rice cultivation — especially irrigated cultivation — cannot be told without reference to the rise of central states, which favored rice cultivation as easy to control and tax. State ideologies disparage systems of food-crop production that are less amenable to state control as primitive, as reflected in folk mythology that depicts the earlier forms of cultivation, for example of tubers, as demanding less knowledge. The native mythology and ritual thus represent the terms of a historical contest over rice cultivation that played out over the centuries. The “constitutive absence” of long-gone crops in contemporary myth and ritual affords people a perspective on the present, showing its apparent inevitability as historically contingent. This exemplifies the capacity for “correctives” like ritual and religion to escape the confines of “conscious purpose.”

Who is the African Farmer? The Importance of Actor Representations in the Debate About Biotechnology Crops in Africa

The discussion about the impact of agricultural biotechnology on Africa is deeply divided and contains widely diverging claims about the impact of biotechnology on African farmers. Building upon literature on the ‘good farmer’ that highlights that farmers identities are an important factor in explaining the success or failure of agricultural change, we argue that the identity of the farmer is an undervalued yet crucial aspect for understanding the debate about the impact of agricultural biotechnology on African farmers. In this article we therefore investigate what farmers’ identities are implicated in the arguments about the impact of biotechnology on African farmers. We aim to identify the main fault lines in different accounts of the African biotechnology farmer by analysing the identities ascribed to them in two prominent cases of controversy: the debates at the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg and the discussion about the impact of biotechnology on smallholder farmers in the Makhathini flats in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa. Our findings demonstrate that arguments about biotechnology are informed by diverging conceptions of who the African farmer is, what is important for the African farmer, and what role the African farmer has in relation to agricultural biotechnology. These findings remain relevant for current discussions on gene editing technologies like CRISPR-Cas. Openly discussing these different views on the identity of smallholder farmers is crucial for moving forward in the biotechnology controversy and can inform future attempts to elicit the farmer’s voice.

Romantic Period Laboring-Class Poetry

This essay surveys significant developments in laboring-class poetry in the Romantic period, most notably the recognition of a self-aware tradition, comprising hundreds of poets, many of whom have been recovered in the last 30 years. Scholars have shifted their approach to the study of laboring-class poets to assert their artistic accomplishments and vital contributions to key characteristics and themes of Romanticism, including the focus on nature, agricultural change, and regional culture, simplicity in style, and experimentation with the ballad form. How the poets were published underwent changes in the period, as many struggled with patrons and found new venues for their work due to the growth of newspapers and periodicals. The current digitization of the archive as well as digital humanities methodologies have opened up the study of the tradition, making possible new discoveries and new understandings of its reach and importance.