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Based on the case of Upemba (UNP) in the DRC, this paper examines agrarian dynamics in a conservation context. It explores how rural populations negotiate the tensions between conservation imperatives and broader regional processes of agrarian change, and in doing so, contribute to shaping rurality.

Paper long abstract

Nature conservation plays a significant role in shaping rural areas by enclosing land, regulating activities, and controlling access to resources. This relationship is well documented (West 2006), and its implications are often quite visible. However, the broader regional dynamics in which conservation areas are embedded, as well as the agency exerted by rural people, are often overlooked.

On the outskirts of Upemba National Park (DRC), agrarian dynamics and ruralities are shaped by multiple narratives and interests. The region has been the subject of competing economic and political projects, such as turning it into a protected area or a food-producing region for the mines of the Copperbelt. Recently, it is becoming a new frontier for agriculture and mining. Viewed from below, rural populations have engaged in these dynamics in diverse ways, depending on the historical period, geographical location, and their social position. For them, the park is sometimes perceived as a partner, sometimes as a repressive force, leading to participation in or contestation of conservation projects. At the same time, recent agrarian transformations -particularly the expansion of commercial rice agriculture- create new opportunities and highlight differentiated peasant trajectories that shape rurality.

Drawing on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork (seven months) and archival research, this paper argues that, to comprehend agrarian dynamics and rurality in this conservation context, it is crucial to better understand how rural populations navigate the dialectical relationship between conservation and broader regional processes. What does it imply for rural communities to live on the park’s outskirts and the Copperbelt’s edge?

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In Yunnan’s coffee frontier, state power, global markets, and returning graduates converge around “specialty” as a new regime of value. This paper traces how neo-rurals navigate these entangled logics, and how their success reconfigures rural hierarchies through the conversion of cultural capital.

Paper long abstract

Older Yunnan farmers call coffee “rice” — a crop for survival. In these borderlands, once among China’s most impoverished, a generation later, their returning children have turned these beans into markers of taste, identity, and modernity.

This generational contrast unfolds within a frontier where state power and global capital converge. The Chinese government channels rural revitalization as developmental momentum; international corporations respond to expanding ethical consumption markets. Neo-rurals leverage these resources: policy subsidies, infrastructural investments, and technical training to construct integrated businesses combining cultivating, processing, tourism, and retail. While attracting media attention that narrates state achievements and corporate ethics. In these rural aesthetic spaces, selling coffee imbued with cultural and sensory value, new farmers navigate entangled regimes through their fluency in the performance of taste, policy rhetoric, and curatorial storytelling.

Mirroring China’s compressed modernity under reform and opening up, this rural transformation simultaneously braids state-led capital investment, industrial intensification, pastoral romanticism, and patriotic pride in producing “good Chinese coffee.” However, neo-rural success operates as a conversion mechanism: educational capital acquired in cities transforms into political leverage and economic advantage in the village. This reconfiguration marginalizes those excluded from high-value chains: smallholders, older farmers, and unprotected seasonal laborers.

Based on 7 months of participant observation in Yunnan's coffee-growing regions, this paper examines how multiple imaginaries produce both new possibilities and new forms of exclusion within China's rural frontier.

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Based on ethnographic research conducted between Sardinia and Provence, this paper analyses the olive oil sector as an “interface in transformation,” where processes of standardization and sensory forms of knowledge reconfigure rural territories through dynamics of valorization and local negotiation

Paper long abstract

This paper analyses the olive oil sector as an interface of multiple possibilities, understood as a rural space invested by economic, institutional, and symbolic projections oriented toward its transformation and valorization (Tsing, 2005; Franquesa, 2018). Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Sardinia and Provence, it examines the role of olive-growing territories in contemporary capitalist reconfigurations, approaching them not as marginal peripheries but as strategic spaces.

Since the 1990s, the olive oil sector has undergone processes of professionalization and standardization driven by European agricultural policies, international institutions—particularly the International Olive Council (IOC)—and the development of markets based on quality, authenticity, and territorial embeddedness.

The analysis highlights the growing articulation between technical forms of knowledge—mechanization, quality standards, processing protocols—and sensory forms of knowledge related to tasting, olfaction, and the “making of taste” (Candau, 2000; 2016). This articulation contributes to the construction of olive oil as a “total product” (Mauss, 1925; Baudrillard, 1970), simultaneously a commodity, a heritage object, and a sensory experience. The research also emphasizes the role of new professional mediators who participate in the normalization of practices and in the embodiment of global market norms within bodies, gestures, and perceptions (Leroi-Gourhan, 1964; Warnier, 2009).

However, these transformations generate frictions between processes of standardization and local attachments. Rural actors negotiate, reinterpret, or contest these dynamics, making olive-growing ruralities a privileged site for observing tensions between domination, value production, and local forms of appropriation.

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This paper explores how public events in a small Hungarian town help maintain local society amid depopulation and vulnerability. The study examines how these events showcase community integrity and local power dynamics while allowing participants to reinforce their social status.

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In public and academic discussions, rural areas are often identified with depopulation and decline, from which anyone who can leaves and migrates to metropolitan centres. At the same time, less is said about the experiences of those who remain in these places, striving to secure a favourable social position for themselves. In our paper, we show through local public events of a small town how local actors maintain the integrity of the local society through these community events.

We regard rural small towns as areas that typically face an influx of resources in the process of global capital accumulation. Outmigration manifests itself primarily as a loss of population, a kind of ‘emptiness’, which constantly threatens the reproduction of local class relations. In this permanent state of "vulnerability," public events will play a prominent role, as they provide an opportunity for these communities to appear as an integral unit with its own specific structure, hierarchies, and values to those who remain in the town. Furthermore, these events also provide an opportunity to showcase the integration of small-town society into broader power structures, such as national politics.

In our paper, we show how these events represent local power relations, how they hold local society together, and what values they give to locality. On the other hand, we focus on how participants of different statuses use these events to maintain, reinforce, or even improve their status. Our presentation is part of a three-year ethnographic research conducted in a small town in rural Hungary.

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Drawing on ethnography from a Szekler subalpine area, this paper shows how people in a partly depopulated peripheral region creatively combine local networks, state benefits, and landscape resources to face uncertainty, revealing resilient practices that challenge deficit views of marginality.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines everyday life in a subalpine region of Szeklerland (Transylvania), where a small population inhabits scattered villages in a historically and geopolitically peripheral area. Transylvania has long been shaped by imperial legacies, shifting borders, and competing nation-building projects. Socialist modernization intensified these dynamics through depopulation and the restructuring of agricultural and labor practices, disrupting earlier forms of land use and locally embedded identity ties. More recently, residents have become partially detached from their surrounding environment while simultaneously confronting new ecological pressures, such as the increasing presence of wild animals within village territories.

Despite these processes of marginalization and decline, the region has not been abandoned. Based on ethnographic fieldwork (and using also literary examples, e.g. Stefánsson), the paper explores how inhabitants mobilize dense local networks and creatively combine diverse resources, ranging from state benefits to informal and experimental income-generating strategies. Landscape and remoteness, often framed as obstacles, are reworked into assets through tourism. Cultural performances and the social circulation of locally produced food are revived. Community-based practices are re-signified as pragmatic responses to economic and demographic uncertainty. These strategies can be understood through the lens of débrouillardise: a flexible, often improvisational mode of survival.

By foregrounding the coexistence of peripherality and centrality, scarcity and multiplicity of resources, vulnerability and resilience, the paper challenges deficit-based approaches to marginal regions. It argues for moving beyond dichotomous frameworks of center and periphery and proposes to approach such locations as sites where alternative configurations of belonging, value, and well-being are actively negotiated.

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Based on ethnographic fieldwork in rural Wyoming, this paper examines how a conservative ranching community sustains a moral order through everyday practices of cooperation and obligation. It shows how continuity is valued as workable and articulated as a viable future.

Paper long abstract

Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in rural Wyoming, this paper examines how a conservative ranching community sustains a moral and practical order that many of its members experience as viable and worth preserving. Rather than approaching this order as an ideological position, the paper focuses on how it is enacted and reproduced through everyday practices.

Ranching serves as a key empirical entry point. In the region, ranching relies heavily on informal cooperation and reciprocal obligations. Collective labour such as brandings or cattle drives brings neighbouring ranches and townspeople together and constitutes a routine infrastructure of mutual support. These obligations extend beyond work, shaping dense local networks that provide assistance in situations of illness, financial strain, or old age—often addressing needs handled by state welfare systems elsewhere.

At the same time, this moral order is shaped by selective engagements with the past and by persistent pressures in the present. Under these conditions, the past functions less as an object of critical reflection than as a stabilizing frame of reference. Selective references to “what was” structure ideas about what should be preserved in the future. Rural futures are thus imagined not as radical reorientation, but as the continuation of a social order that is experienced as workable in everyday life. This perspective also helps to explain why such understandings of continuity and order resonate strongly within contemporary conservative and populist mobilizations.

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An anthropological rereading of transhumance in Andalusia amid demographic crisis and shifting agropastoral values. As over 60% of shepherds near retirement, new generations renegotiate pastoral functions and imaginaries—sustainability, territorial care, animal welfare—producing new ruralities.

Paper long abstract

This paper proposes an anthropological re-reading of transhumance in Andalusia as a rural practice in transformation, situated between demographic crisis and the reconfiguration of the value of agropastoral labour. In Andalusia, more than 60% of current shepherds are expected to retire within the next ten years, making the intergenerational transmission of knowledge related to extensive and transhumant livestock farming an urgent and deeply political issue.

Drawing on the first results of the ethnographic research developed within the project “Trashumancia de saberes: Procesos de transmisión y aprendizaje intergeneracional de conocimientos relativos a la ganadería extensiva y trashumante en Andalucía”, this contribution reflects on some of the ways in which new generations of shepherds reinterpret transhumance with a future-oriented perspective. Our main hypothesis is that these actors renegotiate the functions, values, and imaginaries of pastoral practice by articulating them with discourses on sustainability, territorial care, animal welfare, and labour autonomy, thereby producing new ruralities.

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This paper examines value assignment in a rural border space through a case study of cross-border farming in the Polish–Lithuanian borderland, where cooperation between Polish farmers and Lithuanian landowners mitigates historical and contemporary constraints.

Paper long abstract

In this presentation I want to reflect on a processes of value assignment in a rural border space. My findings are based on the research on the cross-border farming practices in the Polish-Lithuanian borderland I conducted between 2023 and 2025.

Rural space in the aforementioned borderland bears traces of land (de)valorisation by various historical and contemporary actors, such as: farmers, rural inhabitants, capitalistic and socialist states, and supranational entities. The state has viewed this area as both frontier and rural, subjecting it to securitization, peripheralisation, and rural policy change.

The Polish state maintained private ownership of land, but Lithuanian was affected by collectivization and, after 1990, by privatization of agricultural land. The result is still visible today as a profound difference in the condition of rural space, to the benefit of the Polish side of the border. European Union has viewed this area in the same categories – supporting the cross-border cooperation and distributing the subsidies to the farmers.

Polish farmers have assessed the same area as highly valuable due to land hunger and the demand for high-volume production in the capitalist agricultural market of contemporary Poland. Thus after 2008, when border became open Polish farmers and Lithuanian landowners began cooperating, engaging in cross-border farming practices. Polish farmers changed landscape of emptiness when they proposed their vision of utilising the (waste)lands to Lithuanian landowners (Dzenovska, Artiukh, Martin 2023). Tracking the development of these practices tells a story of rural inhabitants actively making use of others’ valuations to support their livelihoods.

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This paper examines Polish farmers’ protests against the EU Green Deal as expressions of deeper rural discontent. It argues that rural Poland emerges as a frontier where competing values, imaginaries, and functions of agriculture are negotiated under contemporary capitalism.

Paper long abstract

This presentation explores Polish farmers’ resistance to the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, focusing on the 2023–2024 protests against the Green Deal. It approaches rural Poland as a frontier of possibilities within contemporary capitalism, where competing imaginaries and assignments of value and function are negotiated through everyday agricultural practices and political contestation. Drawing on ethnographic research, we argue that farmers’ opposition is rooted less in environmental concerns than in long-standing struggles over economic survival, cultural identity, and political autonomy. We call for a more nuanced anthropological understanding of rural protest, emphasizing how economic, historical, cultural, and political factors intersect in shaping rural agency within contemporary capitalism.

The analysis shows how the Green Deal became a symbolic focal point for broader rural discontent toward the EU. Farmers’ narratives reveal how core values—particularly their ethos of autonomy, moral attitudes toward labour, and strong attachment to land—clash with bureaucratic regulation and agricultural models perceived as externally imposed and “Western”. EU policies are widely experienced as economically unjust and as threatening traditional farming practices and national sovereignty. These perceptions are intensified by historical memory, especially experiences of forced collectivization and past forms of foreign control, which continue to shape distrust toward supranational governance.

The presentation conceptualizes the Green Deal as policy framework that revalorize rural spaces by redefining agriculture through regulatory and environmental logics. Farmers respond ambivalently: while they strategically engage with state and EU support, they frame autonomy and freedom from external control as non-negotiable when governance becomes too invasive.

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In California, groundwater regulation is creating both scarcity and property. In this context, fights over groundwater allocations have generated new class identities around locality, farm size and production system. These are struggles pver both the future of farming, and the control of rents.

Paper long abstract

In 2014, to confront plummeting groundwater levels, the state government of California passed the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA). This law empowers local agencies overlying groundwater basins to create and enact plans for regulating its extraction by establishing allocations to landowners. I follow this process in the Valley of Cuyama, home to massive industrial carrot farms that have been mining groundwater for 50 years as well as a small and scattered population of small and medium farmers and ranchers. Residents have developed a notion of class based in property size and residency (small and medium vs. large), ownership (family farms vs. corporate agribusiness), as well as productive modes and methods (industrial vs. artisanal). And while the executives and lawyers of the large farming corporations insist on equality of allocations (and reductions), the small farmers and ranchers argue that equity and justice should be the guiding principles for distributing the scarce resource among dramatically unequal class actors. These differing principles of distribution index different visions for the future of rural California, but in all cases SMGA is turning groundwater into property, and formalizing its value as rent. Who owns the water is now as important as what they do with the water. This paper suggests wider conclusions about the increasing importance of groundwater rents, and the politics that produce them, as rural societies around the world face the hard limits of depletion and scarcity.

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Campesino settlers in La Chiquitanía, Bolivia both rejoice and despair as machines, agrochemicals, fires, pests, and commodities proliferate in this agricultural frontier. Lamenting how preferable and possible futures collapse, they experiment to redraw horizons for rural life within agroindustry.

Paper long abstract

The Agricultural Frontier of Bolivia has for decades evoked imaginaries of territorial and demographic integration and economic development for politicians promoting Mestizo and Amerindian settlement to plough forest and savannah lands. While deforestation, land enclosure, and vertical integration saturated the frontier around central Santa Cruz, fostering peasant displacement, Northern La Chiquitanía was largely discarded by state planners due to a perceived lack of fertile soils and valuable hardwoods. Aided by populist land redistribution to relocate migrant and indigenous communities pressed by agroindustry, this ‘depressed zone’ has since the 2000s become a nexus for campesino settlements. These have become both a regional vector for smallholder-led agricultural expansion and scapegoats for wildfire crises and land tenure conflicts.

Based on fieldwork with Chiquitano and Quechua-speaking settlers in this newly integrated area within the Agricultural Frontier, I depict how settlers shift between rejoicing and despairing as machines, agrochemicals, and consumer commodities, and fires, pests, and deforestation proliferate, and they find themselves increasingly entangled yet at odds with agro-industrial elites. As non-intentional effects of industrialisation and urbanisation spill across communities, fields, and forests, campesinos lament how distinctions between preferable and simply possible futures collapse. In responding with agro-industrial experimentation, they redraw horizons for what counts as valuable for family, community, and the nation-state. These socio-ecological transformations not only foment new subaltern experiences of citizenship recognition through commodity market participation within campesino communities in La Chiquitanía but also foreclose other futures, uprooting plants and people and shackling communities to agro-industrial enterprise and uneven commodity circulation.