Skilling and social reproduction

Abstract

In this paper, we describe links between skilling, the social, environmental, and didactic process by which farmers learn and adapt knowledge; and social reproduction, the work of continually creating the relations and institutions of the political economy. Skilling is always contextual: the ways that people learn on farms are shaped through the ecological possibilities of their space, the political economies in which they do agricultural work, local networks of inclusion and exclusion, and the institutions through which they work and live. Social reproduction theory considers how class is continually formed and labor differentiated. On farms, the work people do also continually creates a physical environment: the stage on which agricultural skill is performed. As such, social reproduction theory can describe not only how institutions create conditions that facilitate skilling but also how they reproduce worlds that inhibit it. This paper illustrates these connections between skill and social reproduction by examining how they intersect with the classic peasant model of agricultural decision-making, the colonial legacy of plantation agriculture, and the deskilling factory model of capitalist agriculture.