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An agrarian imaginary in urban life: cultivating virtues and vices through a conflicted history

journal contribution
posted on 2014-04-01, 00:00 authored by Christopher MayesChristopher Mayes
This paper explores the influence and use of agrarian thought on collective understandings of food practices as sources of ethical and communal value in urban contexts. A primary proponent of agrarian thought that this paper engages is Paul Thompson and his exceptional book, The Agrarian Vision. Thompson aims to use agrarian ideals of agriculture and communal life to rethink current issues of sustainability and environmental ethics. However, Thompson perceives the current cultural mood as hostile to agrarian virtue. There are two related claims of this paper. The first argues that contrary to Thompson’s perception of hostility, agrarian thought is popularly and commercially mobilized among urban populations. To establish this claim I extend Charles Taylor’s notion of a social imaginary and suggest that urban agriculture can be theorized as an agrarian imaginary. Entwined with the first claim is the second, that proponents selectively use agrarian history to overemphasis a narrative of virtue while ignoring or marginalizing historical practices of agrarian violence, exclusion and dispossession. I do not discount or deny the significance of agrarian virtue. By situating agrarian thought within a clearer virtue ethics framework and acknowledging potential manifestation of agrarian vice, I suggest that the idea of agrarian virtue is strengthened.

History

Journal

Journal of agricultural and environmental ethics

Volume

27

Issue

2

Pagination

265 - 286

Publisher

Springer

Location

Dordrecht, The Netherlands

ISSN

1187-7863

eISSN

1573-322X

Language

eng

Publication classification

C1 Refereed article in a scholarly journal

Copyright notice

2013, Springer