Abstract
Agrarianism, according to Paul B. Thompson, is an environmental philosophy focused on agriculture and the nurturing of food, fuel, and fiber. Agrarianism hopes to re-establish our fundamental connection to the land, helping us approach a tenable understanding of sustainability. Thompson enlists Albert Borgmann’s notion of “focal practices” to discuss farming and the culture of the table. With this comes a critique of “the device paradigm,” the modern technological way of life that alienates us from quotidian beauty, lifecycles and seasonality, and vital place-based insights embedded in focal practices and obscures how techno-industrial capitalism limits our opportunities for rich, intimate experiences with our biotic communities. In this paper, the author will outline the contours of Thompson’s agrarian philosophy in light of Borgmann’s focal practices, noting the enduring wisdom in this position. But the author will evoke Sylvia Wynter’s critique of the hegemonic techno-industrial order of things to conjure alternative conceptions of decolonial agrarian futures (that will not foreground bucolic settler-colonial farms).
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Notes
- 1.
I am grateful for the helpful nudges and constructive comments I received from Zachary Piso and Amber Garcia McBride on earlier drafts of this paper.
- 2.
I draw this terminology of “hegemonic techno-industrial order of things” from Wynter (1995b, 22), but I think the notion coincides nicely with Albert Borgmann’s depiction of “technology and its ruling paradigm” (Borgmann 1984, 78). Both Wynter and Borgmann offer analyses of the dominant Western industrial approach to life, subsistence, and production that arises in the modern period (including colonial expansion) and becomes increasingly reliant upon technological devices and commodification. Enlightenment rationality and modern (mechanistic) notions of science are held up as the universal standard. The suggestion is that the modern European (archeological) epistemological structures that tacitly code and govern our perceptual experiences, logics, norms, and methods keep us from seeing alternative paradigms, an alternative order of things.
- 3.
“The device paradigm” denotes the dominant Western approach to life, which arises in the modern period, featuring modern scientific/mechanistic reasoning, industrialism, commodification, and the proliferation of technological devices (Borgmann 1984, 40). Devices, on this account, tend to alienate us from intimate experiences with the natural environment.
- 4.
But this explanation glosses over the idea that these Jeffersonian insights initially worked hand-in-hand with ethnic and racial hierarchies, slave plantations, indigenous dispossession, the exploitation of itinerant labor, and heteropatriarchy. Surely, these racist, sexist, and exploitative aspects of the early agrarian tradition are not aspects that we need to center in the future agrarian visions.
- 5.
Thompson, following Wendell Berry, argues that practices on the family-owned agrarian farm establish roles for each of the members of the family and provide feedback loops that help to regulate labor and leisure (Thompson 2010, 115, 161).
- 6.
Wynter gestures toward new poetic forms of logic and knowledge, new conceptions of culture and “being human” that do not assume Western patterns of hierarchy and domination (Wynter 1995b, 31–34).
- 7.
Thompson notes: “The new vision will not attempt to keep women in “their place” (Thompson 2010, 85).
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McBride, L.A. (2023). Food, Focal Practices, and Decolonial Agrarianism. In: Noll, S., Piso, Z. (eds) Paul B. Thompson's Philosophy of Agriculture. The International Library of Environmental, Agricultural and Food Ethics, vol 34. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37484-5_9
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