Paper short abstract:

Based on ethnographic research I discuss co-habitation as socio-economic strategies in the WWOOF exchange, where subsistence farmers invite farm volunteers into their homes - as live-in help and extended kin - who contribute to the shared household, thereby contesting the nuclear family ideal.

Paper long abstract:

The trend of small-scale and hobby farmers, organic producers and rural lifestylers, eco-villages and rural communes continues to grow in contemporary, industrialised, urban societies. Some of these subsistence households employ strategies of co-habitation - incorporating volunteers into their family households - for social as well as economic reasons, political activism, austerity measure, attempts to increase self-sufficiency, and coping strategies to deal with rural isolation or loneliness. Like "open spaces", many hosts consider their homes to be "open houses" - utopian visions of sustainability, sharing, inclusion and equality (Sargisson and Sargent 2004). Taking the international WWOOF movement (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms) as my empirical context, I explore the sharing of the household of farm hosts and their volunteers as everyday practices. The shared household challenges the norms of the nuclear family ideal and urban household by blurring the spheres of production and consumption. Based on ethnographic research I demonstrate how the sharing of everyday practices creates forms of "relatedness" (Carsten 2000) and 'fictive' kinship. It is a 'kinship of support' (Fischer 2010), but also a 'family of choice' (Maddy 2001) based on exclusion, perpetuating social structures of unequal power, exploitation, and gendered work (Narotzky 1997, Lyon 2010). In discussing processes of how relatedness is established between the inhabitants, I argue that the shared household is part of the participants' imagining of the alternative lifestyle, a social practice of belonging, and strategy against the perceived alienation of urban life and the isolation of the nuclear family.