Whatever happened to the good life?
Katy Fox is an ethnographer who has written a doctoral thesis on how Romanian ţărani are faring under the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). (Ţărani translates as peasants, small-holders, subsistence and semi-subsistence farmers and they constitute a large part of the population as a whole. As Katy Fox points out the word has a more positive meaning in Romanian than in English, because it comes directly from ţara, the word for land.) From October 2006 to January 2008 she did field work in the Romanian capital, Bucharest, and in two parallel valleys in Muntenia, southern Romania. She kept the rural locations a secret to protect her interviewees.
Shepherding and transhumance come into her orbit as examples of economic activities, not as sentimental, mythological or literary ones. What she says is absolutely pertinent as a corrective to the misty-eyed but also dismissive view that Westerners tend to have of peasants in general. To use an agricultural metaphor rather than an architectural one, she has sown hopeful seeds by analysing their very real (if sometimes involuntary!) attributes as sustainers of the environment and owners of valuable knowledge.
Here is an excerpt:
“I would like to show how early ‘welfare’ orientations of the CAP in Western Europe were transformed into a limited, conditional measure within the neoliberal context of the post-1990 CAP that does not actually tackle what it means to live a good life. Instead, as I will show, it reproduces as welfare, the neoliberal tenets of productivity, efficiency, specialisation and progress. In the Western European context the CAP was not only a defensive measure, but also a welfare measure... It helped to counteract... the rural exodus... [The] CAP has been undergoing much reform... towards incorporating rural development programmes that are meant to ‘improve the quality of social, economic and natural environment within the village.’ (Axis 3), However the way in which the CAP was... put into practice in Romania as a welfare measure was... limited and conditioned on assumptions of modernisation, productivity and efficiency... Ţărani [peasants] did not actually qualify as producers because they produced very little for the market.
...The following statement by an economist [presumably Romanian, name not supplied] supports my point about how much production and productivity is bound up with profit, consumerism and the capitalist machine:
‘They sell nothing, they buy little... I think their
future is a slow disappearance...’
[The] peasants had a very different evaluation of their own productive work compared to elites whose own livelihood would derive from wage labour or from entrepreneurial activity. A good and honest person, it was assumed, works hard for what he or she gets.”
The title of Katy Fox’s thesis is EU Integration as Reconfiguration of Value: Work and Resourcefulness in the Southern Carpathian Mountains of Romania (University of Aberdeen, 2010). The above extract comes from Chapter 2, ‘Projects: Europe, the CAP and Peasant Agriculture’.