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Paper short abstract

Based on long-term ethnographic research among agricultural cooperatives in post-socialist rural Romania, this paper examines cooperation not as a normative ideal, but as a historically situated, power-laden strategy that both mitigates and reproduces social and economic polarisation.

Paper long abstract

Based on long-term ethnographic research among agricultural communities in post-socialist rural Romania, this paper examines cooperation not as a taken-for-granted social good, but as a historically situated and power-laden social practice in a polarised agrarian economy. Focusing on German (Swabian) villages in the Satu Mare region, the paper analyses multiple cooperative forms that have emerged since the collapse of socialist collectivisation, including large-scale agricultural associations, newly established, subsidy-driven cooperatives, and informal, quasi-cooperative collaborations.

Drawing on ethnographic material and the concepts of social embeddedness and weak ties, the paper explores how cooperation is actively produced, negotiated, and contested across these organisational forms. Long-standing agricultural associations have enabled communities to retain collective control over land and to integrate into global food chains, while simultaneously generating exclusionary dynamics, high entry barriers, and asymmetries between professionalised management and landowning members. Newer cooperative initiatives and informal collaborations, by contrast, foreground flexibility, innovation, and horizontal knowledge-sharing, yet remain vulnerable to market volatility, labour precarity, and dependence on external funding and policy regimes.

By comparing these cooperative arrangements, the paper highlights how cooperation simultaneously bridges and reinforces polarisation: between global markets and local livelihoods, capital-intensive agribusiness and small-scale producers, and stability and adaptability. Rather than approaching cooperation as a normative ideal or a singular solution to rural crisis, the analysis foregrounds its ambivalent character as both a site of collective possibility and a field of power. In doing so, the paper contributes to broader anthropological debates on cooperation as a contested, relational practice in a polarised world.