Farmers as Bodies-in-the-Field, Becoming-With Rice

Abstract

Research on farmers has predominately focused on how they think through the mind, i.e., their reflexivity regarding farming practices and values, as well as their cultural and symbolic representations of farming. While this literature offers valuable insights, it builds on an underlying mind/body duality. Based on qualitative interviews with 25 rice farmers in Japan, this paper focuses on the body of farmers, in terms of how bodily senses shape how farmers make sense of their farming practices. We show that the body, as the site of interaction with matter, shapes the farmers’ ability to be affected by rice plants. By honing their senses, the farmers learn to make differences and to perceive new possibilities, engaging in a reciprocal process of becoming-with the rice. This ability to develop sensuous engagements may contribute to farmers developing production practices that are in harmony with the local agro-ecosystem and more generally enable new imaginations, strengthening the possibility that things could be otherwise.

Metabolic agricultural ethics: Violence and care beyond the gate

“…A related body of work has sought to describe the optimum spatial distribution of food production as a function of agricultural potential and land use opportunity (Heistermann et al 2006; McDowell et al 2018) and the agricultural practices that pertain to both environmental and productivity improvements (Adeux et al 2019; Lechenet et al 2017). While the agricultural sector is already highly attuned to environmental and productivity win-wins and an “agricultural potential-appropriate land use” calculus (Cusworth and Dodsworth 2021), social scientists need to be attentive to and affected by these literatures, too.…”

“…The constituent components of agricultural care-ontological entanglement, affect, attentiveness, and everyday caring behaviors-exist in a self-sustaining rhythm (Alarcon et al 2020;Leung and Darnhofer 2021;Moriggi et al 2020; Puig de la Bellacasa 2010). The farmers who embrace their interconnected and mutual constitution of agro-ecosystems become attentive to and affected by the needs of their nonhuman co-habitants; and the enactment of caring ethical doings, guided by affect and attentiveness, further stimulates commitment to an ontological framing that emphasizes the indivisibility of human-nonhuman entanglement.…”