Farmers and Farmworkers

Abstract

Strategic alterity is defined here as a process of shifting between different assertions of devalued group identity in order to valorize free-trading citizens of the market and to mask the labor of those making that free market participation possible (by moralizing the devalorization). The examples provided here - based on ethnographic, oral history, and archival research in an eastern Kentucky, US community - focus on the ways that different markers of identity have characterized the farmworkers providing the low-wage or non-wage labor in tobacco over the past two centuries that has made it possible for those whose crops they work in to see themselves as independent, family farmers. Tobacco is viewed, here, as having always been a global crop produced by a ‘globalized’ labor force. The ideological arguments, most recently neoliberal, justifying the differential power (and ‘market citizenship’) of farmers and farm-workers are examined within a US context, with suggestions for comparative and historical approaches to interpreting current strategies of inclusion and exclusion related to neoliberal capitalist globalization.

From Neighbors to Migrants: The Shifting Organization of Agricultural Labor in East Tennessee

“…Contemporary agricultural labor patterns in the southeastern United States are frequently associated with historical patterns of slavery, sharecropping, and tenant farming. Anthropologists working in central Kentucky have argued that the control of agricultural labor relies on racial and ethnic stigmas that stem from the hierarchical labor structures of the past (Buck 2001; Kingsolver 2007). Despite some work that points to divergent systems of labor organization (Hahamovitch 1997), most research done in the southeast tends to overlook agricultural work that lacks a foundation in southern slavery.…”

Giants in the Fields: Agribusiness and Farm Labor Politics in the United States

“…Along with other anthropologists of tobacco agriculture I have emphasized that these power dynamics are not inevitable. They reflect a history of labor subordination in the agricultural sector as well as recent structural changes in the tobacco economy and the tendency among growers to respond in defensive ways (Kingsolver 2007; Benson 2008a, 2008b).…”

“…In the United States, Mexican migrants are depicted as “other,” often regardless of how they present themselves (Chávez 2001; De Genova 2005; Kingsolver 2007). This process is certainly not uniform across all social classes, no more than are growers or labor contractors uniformly depicted one way or another.…”

Tobacco is Going, Going … But Where?

“…Ann Kingsolver (1991, 2007) has written about tobacco farmers in her home community in east‐cental Kentucky for some time, and she is the first anthropologist to write about them after the buyout. But her primary interest is not in the consequences of the buyout.…”

“…Likewise, we must not forget that, not only have tobacco's structures of feeling changed over time, but those structures are dependent upon one's place in the cultural web of tobacco. After all, tobacco production has always relied on low‐wage or unpaid workers (Kingsolver 2007:89), and, as a result, not all members of the tobacco culture have benefitted equally from the tobacco program. Tobacco quotas—tied as they were to farms, rather than farmers—benefitted landowners disproportionately over those who actually grew the crop.…”