Watermelon production as the driver of community resilience: More-than-human agency and the transforming rural assemblage

Highlights

• Structure-agency and bounce back-transformative resilience divisions may be dissolved by assemblage approaches.

• Resilience is a system of processes and a phenomenon constantly reproduced by daily practices of agricultural production.

• Rural communities are assembled of human and non-human components that take material and expressive roles.

• Changing relations between humans and non-humans triggers non-human agency.

• Territorialising and de-territorialising forces may unravel how temporal stability and new contingencies are emerging.

Abstract

The dynamics of rural change are often linked to frameworks of ‘rural community resilience’, a body of literature associated with various aspects of society including social capital, community initiatives, and governance. Drawing on emergent literature, this study aims to explore how assemblage approaches may disseminate resilience thinking via dissolving structure-agency and bounce-back-transformative divisions. The paper explores how deliberate, and often policy-orientated actions, are intertwined with ‘non-intentional’ activities and processes that are deeply embedded in daily rural life. The paper further illustrates rural development processes through a case study of the watermelon-producing community of Medgyesegyháza, Hungary: a community that, in recent years, has been praised for its endurance throughout a period of socio-economic turbulence.

The aim is to demonstrate how assemblage theory may explain the emergence of intermingling human and non-human agency. It was observed that the resilience of the rural community assemblage is embedded in daily practices, and emerges from relations between two main components: humans and watermelons. By applying the concept of territorialisation, this paper examines how components of the assemblage become aligned as provisional stability is established. The paper contends that the engagement with non-humans establishes community identity, but changes in relations de-territorialise the assemblage and trigger new contingencies. The precarious nature of human-watermelon relationships have repercussions on stability as they may serve as drivers of change.

Introduction

On July 27, 2016 the watermelon producers of Medgyesegyháza, Hungary gathered in a suburb of Budapest and besieged the parking lot of the multinational retailer Tesco, in order to protest against the rock bottom retail prices and the hectic market conditions. Mr Oravecz, the chairperson of the Watermelon Producers’ Association explained the media “in the long run farmers will give up unprofitable production and the watermelon producing community will cease” (Mikóczy 2016). Watermelon producers made great efforts to publicise their grievances on multiple occasions, in recent years sparking tensions between producers, traders, wholesale retailers, the government and the public following media reports.

The hardships faced by the major watermelon-producing community of Hungary, and the attempted community responses, resemble phenomena experienced worldwide across rural communities and agricultural industries in the era of globalization (Woods 2003). Transformation processes surrounding agricultural communities are one of the core topics of rural geography, often analysed in the frame of political economy or rural sociology. More recently these processes may also be studied in the context of ‘community resilience’ (e.g. Darnhofer et al., 2010; 2016; Skerratt 2013). This new strand of research channels results from a broad spectrum of works in order to better understand how communities are able to sustain their function, identity and remain viable in a broader sense. Relatively little is known about how such resilience thinking is different from earlier works on rural change, and on what basis may communities be considered resilient or not. Using an assemblage perspective, this paper aims to further examine the forces that actually take place within complex processes, that either make a community experience transformation or withstand change.

Recent work in rural geography (Scott 2013; Darnhofer et al., 2016) has started to question the suitability of traditional approaches to rural community resilience that either focus on social-ecological systems, or are engaged with the active agency of communities and their resources. While the first approach applies the rules of ecology to rurality, considering a system of components, other studies (e.g. Flora et al., 2004; Magis 2010; Amundsen 2012) engage with the questions of active agents, community networks, identity and values as community resources are utilized in response to change. In their recent work, Darnhofer et al. (2016) propose the application of relational approaches to dissolve this binary. However, it is currently widely accepted that community resilience is a process in which groups bound by agricultural practices, culture and identity are able to withstand certain changes, perhaps by transforming in other ways. In this sense, resilience can refer to a system where every transaction, movement flow of materials or information can be regarded as benign or malicious in moving – or building the capacity to move – in the right direction. This paper argues that the agency needed to stabilize or transform the community is much more precarious: resilience of a community is not always a product of intentional processes but also lies in everyday practices and human-non-human relationships. As such, this paper aims to focus on how rural community resilience can be placed on firmer ontological groundings by applying assemblage approaches. The main objective of this article is to test how the assemblage approach developed by DeLanda (2006) can help us rethink what resilience may mean in rural settings. In this sense the Hungarian watermelon farming community of Medgyesegyháza analysed in this paper is considered a territorialised more-than-human assemblage of family farm resulting from specific watermelon production practices. The proactive agency and daily practices involving non-humans are treated in the same manner: community wide coping strategies, grafting techniques, controversial marketing activities, or emotional attachment to watermelon farming all contribute to the resilience of the community in one way or the other. The paper sets out to examine how treating the community as such a ‘whole of interacting parts’ offers a joint framework to both ‘bounce-back’ and ‘transformative’ resilience. The next sections further review existing literature on resilience and establish the theoretical framework regarding community assemblages that will be applied in the empirical study in the second half of the paper.