Paper Short Abstract:

An intimate look into family entrepreneurship, based on longitudinal ethnography in and around dairy farming and cheese making in the Lombard mountains, shows how caring while competing informs 'futuring', for kin, rivals, migrant laborers, residents, researchers and tourists.

Paper Abstract:

This paper offers an intimate look into family entrepreneurship in Northern Italy based on longitudinal ethnography, informed by about two decades of fieldwork in and around dairy farming and cheese making in the Lombard alpine valleys north of Bergamo. I show how global capitalism affects and informs daily decision-making and strategizing about the future, and how this ripples through generations of kin, competitors, migrant laborers, residents and tourists.

The language of ‘caring for the territory’ (through sustainable growth, a rhetoric of belonging, and more-than-human ecologies) informs by now both marketing imagery and governance discourse. However, embracing these ecologies only in word does not deliver 'futuring'. Lack of predictability (of climate, supply, market, and state aid) leads to elusive conservativism and stagnation (demographic and economic).

Beyond cynical costs/benefits rationalizations, this paper utilizes a personal narrative of ‘para-ethnography’ with a young female entrepreneur, one of many “subjects who are deeply complicit with and implicated in powerful institutional processes”, while only remaining “moderately empowered people”, to use the words of George Marcus (2000). 'Parasitic and adjacent' on a field that keeps calling her back in, the anthropologist registers a quiet revolution affecting and undoing embedded social and economic assumptions about solidarity and diversity. Unorthodox kin relations, compliance with USDA regulations for export, and dependence on migrant labor are some of the elements of the social, political and epistemic transformations rippling over the surface of profoundly unsettled ecologies and economies. Broad, new entrepreneurial skills and challenging decisions about scale inform these transformations.