Doctoral Dissertation Research: Mobile Farming Families of Southern Appalachia and the Mexican Bajio

自20世纪末以来，北美农业生计经历了重大转变。变化包括粮食系统的重组，使当地农业经济日益与全球网络和流程联系在一起。当地食品生产商的一个反应有些令人惊讶，那就是以家庭为基础的跨国农业企业的兴起，尽管这些企业是中小型企业，但它们成功地跨州协调，促进了垂直一体化经营，减轻了不平等，并进入了农产品市场。该奖项支持的研究将调查这是如何发生的：当地家庭水果和蔬菜生产商如何利用全球网络，协调跨区域项目，并为粮食系统流通做出贡献？传统的家庭农场组织模式，如亲属关系网络，在当代农业经营中扮演什么角色？这项研究将由肯塔基大学的博士生玛丽·伊丽莎白·w·施密德（Mary Elizabeth W. Schmid）在人类学家安·e·金索沃（Ann E. Kingsolver）博士的指导下，在阿巴拉契亚南部的北卡罗来纳州西部地区进行，并在美国东南部其他州和墨西哥进行比较研究。Schmid将记录家族和企业的历史、供应策略、关系形式、文化实践和决策过程，以确定成员如何利用家族和非家族关系来实现跨时间和空间的战略生产、分销和营销协调。她的混合方法将包括档案研究、参与性观察、访谈、社会网络分析、民族志绘图和文本数据定性分析。她将绘制家庭和企业网络、时间周期、跨国亲属关系流动以及水果和蔬菜生产和销售的社会组织。这项研究的结果将有助于理解中小型水果和蔬菜生产企业在当代经济中的运作，以及旨在规范这一部门的农业政策的社会和经济影响。

North American agricultural livelihoods have gone through significant transitions since the late twentieth century. Changes include the restructuring of food systems so that local farming economies are increasingly tied to global networks and processes. One somewhat surprising response on the part of local food producers has been the rise of binational family-based farming enterprises, which, despite being small to midscale ventures, successfully coordinate across state lines to facilitate vertically integrated operations, mitigate inequities, and access produce markets. The research supported by this award will investigate how this occurs: how do local family fruit and vegetable producers utilize global networks, coordinate transregional projects, and contribute to food system circulations? And what role do traditional modes of organizing family farms, such as kinship networks, play in contemporary farming operations? The research will be carried out by University of Kentucky doctoral student Mary Elizabeth W. Schmid, with direction from anthropologist Dr. Ann E. Kingsolver, in the western North Carolina region of southern Appalachia, with comparative research in other southeastern U.S. states and Mexico. Schmid will document family and enterprise histories, provisioning strategies, forms of relatedness, cultural practices, and decision-making processes to determine how members draw on family and non-family relations to enable strategic production, distribution, and marketing coordination across time and space. Her mixed methods approach will include archival research, participant observation, interviewing, social network analysis, ethnographic mapping, and qualitative analysis of textual data. She will map family and enterprise networks, temporal cycles, transnational kinship circuit flows, and the social organization of fruit and vegetable production and marketing. Findings from this research will contribute to understanding the functioning of small to midscale fruit and vegetable production enterprises in the contemporary economy and the social and economic effects of agricultural policies intended to regulate this sector.