Fledgling Farms and Failing Trust: Transformations of More-than-Human Care in the Serbian Countryside

We are happy to announce this forthcoming presentation by our postdoc André Thiemann on 25 July at the panel Depopulated Epistemologies: Creative Action, Demographic Change and Social Reproduction, as part of the German Association of Social and Cultural Anthropology’s Biennial Conference in Munich, Germany.

Extending from an ethnographic case study of the existential troubles of a Serbian farm to continue producing traditional foodstuffs such as pork and frozen raspberries for the global market, this paper examines the intertwining of human and non-human labour (production) with socio-economic policies and care (reproduction). Different waves of state transformation – the build-up and decay of formal employment coupled with the emergence, then exhaustion of the welfare state, its socio-liberal transformation in the early 2000s, followed by its polypore repurposing for illiberal ends since 2012, have led to a strong distrust in the state’s will to care for its populations. Significantly, roughly half of the Serbian citizens did not believe the state’s vaccination campaign. Mobilisations against political powerholders were framed as care for farming, but more common was exit: skilled and unskilled workers emigrated to Western labour markets, while techno-scientific institutions to mitigate climate change remained underfunded. Seemingly private concerns were thus enmeshed within wider, increasingly dispirited struggles over (post-)truth and trust on the frontiers of the welfare state, agriculture and techno-science.