Voici les éléments 1 - 10 sur 21
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    The project, the everyday, and reflexivity in sociotechnical agri‑food assemblages: proposing a conceptual model of digitalisation
    (2022-11-20) ;
    Dwiartama, Angga
    Digital technologies have opened up new perspectives in thinking about the future of food and farming. Not only do these new technologies promise to revolutionise our way of meeting global food demand, they do so by boldly claiming that they can reduce their environmental impacts. However, they also have the potential to transform the organisation of agri-food sys- tems more fundamentally. Drawing on assemblage theory, we propose a conceptual model of digitalisation organised around three facets: digitalisation as a project; “everyday digitalisation”; and reflexive digitalisation. These facets reflect different relations between concrete practices and representations, imaginaries, and narratives, while representing different modes of agency: the collective, the distributed, and the individual, which, we argue, highlight contrasting ways for human and non- human actors to engage with digitalisation. With this model anchored in assemblage theory, we offer a tool for critically and comprehensively engaging with the complexity and multiplicity of digitalisation as a sociotechnical process. We then apply our theoretical framework to two ethnographic studies, one explores the growth of digital technologies in Switzerland as a way to govern and monitor national agriculture, the other focuses on Indonesia, where small digital startups have begun to dot the landscape. By identifying the material and semiotic processes occurring in each case, we notice similar issues being raised in terms of how digitalisation is co-constructed in society.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Governing Farmers through data? Digitization and the Question of Autonomy in Agri-environmental governance
    The digitization of the agricultural sector is connected with a number of promises that have been widely debated in both the public and the academic spheres. But attention has been mainly focused on farm production or management techniques, often neglecting the realm of governance, which has also begun a digital transformation. This article explores the premises of an informational model of governance and the integration of a logic of big data into agri-environmental governance in Switzerland. More specifically, it examines this process from the perspective of the autonomy of the farmers, by looking more specifically at how these changes in governance create or not possibilities for farmer autonomization, in terms of identity, action, and structures. In spite of some discourses that present digitization as a tool to lighten administrative constraints and a way to aid in the independent management of agricultural activity, our analysis reveals a more qualified picture: at the present time, digitization reinforces the bureaucratic approach to governance, and the contribution of digital technologies to the interests of the farmers themselves remains minimal. In conclusion, it appears that the accent that has been placed on the service done for farmers is primarily part of a rhetoric aimed at encouraging involvement, and that rhetoric contributes to making other interests, which are more central to the constitution of an informational governance model, invisible.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Farmers’ empowerment and learning processes in accountability practices: An assemblage perspective
    (2021-6-11)
    Certification and standards are key instruments to implement accountability in the contemporary governance of food systems. They are based on the idea that, thanks to the creation and circulation of information, promises to consumers are kept in increasingly complex value chains. However, critical examinations also describe it as a symptom of an ongoing globalisation and neoliberalisation, shifting power from the state to market actors, in particular retailers and supermarkets. This paper offers a new perspective on accountability within the tripartite standards regime, inspired by an assemblage approach and focusing on power relations and knowledge creation, as fundamental dimensions. The example of IP-Suisse, a Swiss farmer organisation and a food label, allows us to identify multiple contradictory power and knowledge processes that are simultaneously unfolding within the agri-environmental governance assemblage. Beyond the expected dominance of powerful actors (particularly retailers) and the relentless bureaucratisation of governance, more positive processes also emerge, including a collective empowerment of farmers and the realization of cumulative and progressive learning through new collaborations and experiments. The assemblage approach suggests that the point is not so much to invent a new blueprint for better accountability practices, but rather to understand the specific processes taking place within a given AEG assemblage and then to encourage the creation of new alliances to strengthen those processes that are most likely to foster experimentation and knowledge. It thereby obliges us to take the multiplicity of transformational processes seriously, as a starting point for developing innovative accountability practices.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    La contrainte et l’alimentation comme vecteurs d’autonomisation dans des réseaux agroalimentaires alternatifs
    Basé sur des recherches ethnographiques auprès d’initiatives d’agriculture contractuelle de proximité en Suisse : des collectifs réunissant producteurs et consommateurs autour d’un projet alimentaire commun, cet article propose de contribuer à la réflexion sur de nouvelles utopies agro-alimentaires, les réalités empiriques qu'elles recouvrent et les transformations de sens, mais aussi de modes de régulation, qu'elles opèrent. Deux éléments constituent les vecteurs essentiels des recompositions induites par et dans ces réseaux agroalimentaires : 1) la contrainte liée aux termes du contrat qui lient les consommateurs à l’initiative tout en renforçant l'autonomie des producteurs vis-à-vis de la grande distribution; 2) l'aliment, dont la qualité et la valeur sont redéfinies et qui agit comme un médiateur dans la reconfiguration de la relation producteur-consommateur. Nous montrons que le maintien de l’insertion des participants dans d’autres formes de commercialisations et de consommations, plus conventionnelles, favorise une interprétation positive des contraintes comme facteurs d’autonomisation partielle et la constitution d’utopies alimentaires vécues.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Beyond Soyisation – Donau Soja as Assemblage
    (2018)
    Bentia, Dana
    ;
    Soybeans embody the contradictions of progress in the Western imagination. They proliferated as a utopian promise (cheap vegetal protein for all) only to develop over a short two decades into a symbol of failure (GMOs). Most recently, as a response to the multiple crises of boundless capitalist accumulation and environmental degradation, concerted efforts were variously mobilized in Europe to re-think and re-make the ways in which soy is used along the food value chain. The Donau Soja project emerged as a hybrid, multi-level, transnational programme to assist and intervene in the transformation towards green and just soy supplies in Europe. This chapter gives an overview over this young project and takes the challenge of rendering the complexity of tasks it is confronted with, given the multiple contestations around global soy. It particularly emphasizes the processes involved in reassembling the materialities of soy as these emerge from dynamics of de- and reterritorialization that work both for the re-localization of this agricultural crop as much as they do for decentring its significance in the global value chain.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Searching for ethics. Legal requirements and empirical issues for anthropology
    (2018) ; ;
    Berthod, Marc-Antoine
    ;
    ;
    Ossipow-Wuest, Laurence
    ;
    Kradolfer, Sabine
    This paper analyses the new legal provisions impacting qualitative research practices and contributing to the institutionalization of research ethics in Switzerland. After contextualizing the emergence of new forms of research regulation, it shows how their epistemological assumptions challenge anthropology. It then explores the issues related to the articulation between procedural ethics and processual ethics. Finally, it discusses the different postures which might possibly be adopted by scholars in anthropology and other qualitative social sciences
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    The more-than-economic dimensions of co-operation in food production
    (2017-5-25)
    Emery, Steven
    ;
    ;
    Wynne-Jones, Sophie
    Moving forwards from an extensive literature on farmers' cooperatives, this Special Issue aims to explore the interaction and interdependence of multiple material and immaterial benefits associated with cooperation. The eight papers gathered here address a range of contexts to explore the inseparability of a set of ‘more-than-economic’ benefits of cooperation and consider the wider implications of viewing cooperation in such light. Responding to their insights, this editorial reflects upon the ontological ambiguity of concepts of economy and the political potentiality of cooperative activities. In addition, we highlight three key themes raised by the papers, which emphasize the complexity of processes and values included in cooperation: Relatedness and Embeddedness; Institutions and Formalisation; Histories and Futures. Reflecting on the transformative capacities of cooperation described in this collection, we argue that valuing cooperation as a process rather than a means to fixed-ends can carry its own emancipatory potential, given the ways in which this can work to counter the compartmentalising tendencies of capitalism. However, we conclude by cautioning that the addressing of more pervasive structural impediments needs to be integrated into cooperative endeavours if such potential is to be fully realised.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Co-operative values beyond hybridity: The case of farmers’ organisations in the Swiss dairy sector
    (2017-4-10) ;
    Häberli, Isabel
    After the abolition of milk quotas in Switzerland, dairy farmers had to reorganise. New farmers' organisations emerged and traditional co-operatives had to search for strategies at multiple levels (markets, membership, services provision, and diversification) to strengthen their position. In this ethnographic study, we analyse three central co-operative values – democracy, solidarity, autonomy – and their translation and development within the adaptation strategies developed by five farmers' organisations. Despite the many challenges to co-operative values related to a context of market deregulation, the new strategies developed demonstrate the continued importance and rejuvenation of these co-operative values as narratives and practices. In addition, results show a blurring of boundaries between organisations of different kinds (specifically co-operatives and public limited companies) and overlaps in the strategies employed by both (including new forms of collaboration and marketing). Whilst these emerging forms, and the associated strategies and values embodied, could be read as the hybridization of a traditional co-operative approach, we argue that the concept of hybridity unduly polarises co-operatives and corporates in a way that does not acknowledge the implicit plurality of motivations and behaviours in all forms of business structure. Consequently, the paper argues that looking at the practices of co-operation, beyond rigid categories, helps to understand better how co-operative values are actually enacted within farmers’ organisations.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Family farming and gendered division of labour on the move: a typology of farming family configurations
    (2017)
    Contzen, Sandra
    ;
    Family farming, understood as a household which combines family, farm and commercial activity, still represents the backbone of the world’s agriculture. On family farms, labour division has generally been based on complementarity between persons of different gender and generations, resulting in specific male and female spheres and tasks. In this ‘traditional’ labour division, gender inequality is inherent as women are the unpaid and invisible labour force. Although this ‘traditional’ labour division still prevails through time and space, new arrangements have emerged. This paper asks whether we are witnessing changes in the unequal structure of family farming and analyses the diversity of farming family configurations, using the Swiss context as a case study. The typology of farming-family configurations developed, based on qualitative data, indicates that inequalities are related to status on the farm and position in the configuration rather than to gender identity per se. This insight enables a discussion of equality and fairness in a new light. This paper shows that farming-family configurations are often pragmatic but objectively unequal. However, these arrangements might still be perceived as fair when mutual recognition exists, resulting in satisfaction among the family members. The paper concludes that although family farming presents challenges to gender equality, some types of farming-family configurations offer new pathways towards enhanced gender equality.