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Young organic farmers in Japan: Betting on lifestyle, locality, and livelihood

Young organic farmers in Japan: Betting on lifestyle, locality, and livelihood This analysis of Japanese organic farmers in their 30s and 40s gains insight from Lyng’s framework of ‘edgework’—a transgression of life/death boundaries by sports practitioners. Young farmers emerged in qualitative fieldwork as ‘occupational edge-workers,’ crisscrossing binaries such as urban/rural, mind/body, and economic/moral. They manage risks and navigate uncertainties of natural forces, traditional village practices, neoliberal pressures to be entrepreneurial in the market, and judgment of older, purer organic farmers. With goals of living in harmony with nature, intimate others, and community, they create lifestyles in marginal rural localities by which they can make selves that are alternative to the neoliberal narrative, yet act as entrepreneurial subjects that risk bringing their version of morality to the market, via delicious, organic food sold to self-creating consumers. Claiming normality and spurning ideas of organic as a movement, their alterity is partial and practical as they exploit the potentials of this risky border zone. Conducted in 2012 and 2014, this research contributes to investigating alternative lifestyles in Japan, exploring the changing nature of alternative food movements in the neoliberal era, and understanding active agency for self and the environment in the neoliberal situation of entrepreneurial subjectivities, edgy self-making, and historical traditions. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Contemporary Japan Taylor & Francis

Young organic farmers in Japan: Betting on lifestyle, locality, and livelihood

Rosenberger, Nancy
Contemporary Japan , Volume 29 (1): 17 – Jan 2, 2017
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Young organic farmers in Japan: Betting on lifestyle, locality, and livelihood

Abstract

This analysis of Japanese organic farmers in their 30s and 40s gains insight from Lyng’s framework of ‘edgework’—a transgression of life/death boundaries by sports practitioners. Young farmers emerged in qualitative fieldwork as ‘occupational edge-workers,’ crisscrossing binaries such as urban/rural, mind/body, and economic/moral. They manage risks and navigate uncertainties of natural forces, traditional village practices, neoliberal pressures to be...
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Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Copyright
© 2016 German Institute for Japanese Studies
ISSN
1869-2737
eISSN
1869-2729
DOI
10.1080/18692729.2017.1256974
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

This analysis of Japanese organic farmers in their 30s and 40s gains insight from Lyng’s framework of ‘edgework’—a transgression of life/death boundaries by sports practitioners. Young farmers emerged in qualitative fieldwork as ‘occupational edge-workers,’ crisscrossing binaries such as urban/rural, mind/body, and economic/moral. They manage risks and navigate uncertainties of natural forces, traditional village practices, neoliberal pressures to be entrepreneurial in the market, and judgment of older, purer organic farmers. With goals of living in harmony with nature, intimate others, and community, they create lifestyles in marginal rural localities by which they can make selves that are alternative to the neoliberal narrative, yet act as entrepreneurial subjects that risk bringing their version of morality to the market, via delicious, organic food sold to self-creating consumers. Claiming normality and spurning ideas of organic as a movement, their alterity is partial and practical as they exploit the potentials of this risky border zone. Conducted in 2012 and 2014, this research contributes to investigating alternative lifestyles in Japan, exploring the changing nature of alternative food movements in the neoliberal era, and understanding active agency for self and the environment in the neoliberal situation of entrepreneurial subjectivities, edgy self-making, and historical traditions.

Journal

Contemporary Japan – Taylor & Francis

Published: Jan 2, 2017

Keywords: Japan; risk; organic agriculture

References

  • Extending the boundaries: Reframing ‘entrepreneurship as social change’ through feminist perspectives
  • From hegemony to affinity: The political logic of the newest social movements
  • Culture sits in places: Reflections on globalism and subaltern strategies of localization
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  • Organic Japan and the global organic network
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  • Production, consumption, prosumption: The nature of capitalism in the age of the digital ‘prosumer’
  • Global food terror in Japan: Risk perception in media, nation and women
  • Japanese organic farmers: Strategies of uncertainty after the Fukushima disaster
  • Governing future potential biothreats
  • The spatial self: Location-based identity performance on social media
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  • Local food: A social movement?
  • Intimacy for sale: Masculinity, entrepreneurship, and commodity self in Japan’s neoliberal situation
  • Beyond alternative: Exploring the potential for autonomous food spaces
  • The productive life of risk