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Paper short abstract

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.