Changes in Farmers’ Modes of Work in Podlasie

Amanda Krzyworzeka

doi:10.53098/wir012021/03

Abstract

Over a long time, a unique peasant mode of work developed in rural areas, which has been described in substantial detail by scholars including ethnographers, historians and rural sociologists. It was largely based on concentrating on the process and not the result, affirming work as such, cooperation with family members and neighbours, and work being embedded in a social context. This model underwent substantial change already under communism, but recent decades have accelerated the process. In the face of the structural transformation of rural areas, but also wider changes related to the sphere of work in late modernity, values once fundamental to peasants no longer play such an important role in the lives of present-day farmers. They have been replaced with other attitudes; different skills have become necessary, different attitudes have become valuable. The reasons for this include the fact that farmers realise that their children will probably seek their life’s path outside agriculture, and therefore they bring them up differently. The paper discusses not only new modes of work in agriculture and the system of values behind them, but also the sources from which farmers draw such new models.

Highlights

Centuries of working on the land resulted in a unique mode of farmers’ work that we could observe in late 20th century, and which recently underwent significant changes with the extremely rapidly changing conditions in agriculture
Some researchers believe it is possible to trace the influence of earlier circumstances in subsequent modes of work; for example, attitudes that developed under serfdom continued to affect the way peasants worked and the values they professed for a long time afterwards
Sources of certain types of behaviour might be sought in folk religiousness, the social relations between the peasants and other classes, including the landed gentry and intelligentsia, and, in the unique role that was officially ascribed to farmers under communism

Summary

Introduction

Centuries of working on the land resulted in a unique mode of farmers’ work that we could observe in late 20th century, and which recently underwent significant changes with the extremely rapidly changing conditions in agriculture. The last 15 years, i.e. the time when Poland has been subject to the EU’s common agricultural policy (CAP), have brought Polish farmers many structural changes, which have resulted, among other things, in the depopulation of rural areas, an increase in the average farm size, and new requirements related to the quality of food produced. The paper will discuss the changes in farmers’ modes of work from the point of view of anthropology ( economic anthropology and the anthropology of work), starting with a presentation of the traditional model of working on the land This will be followed by the contemporary, very different mode of work pursued by those farmers who have adjusted their farms to EU requirements and have been successful in staying on the market. Alongside the literature on the subject, the conclusions related to recent decades will be based on the author’s own, long ethnographic fieldwork conducted among farmers in the Podlasie, Roztocze, Mazovia and Podhale regions over the past 20 years

What Moulded Farmers’ Modes of Work?

What Has Changed?

Conclusion