Farming on the Fringe

After more than a decade of research on northern latitude hunter-gatherers, in the 1980s I embarked on a project examining coping strategies of subarctic agriculturalists. Finland was chosen for its long history of northern farming adaptations. More specifically, my field research was conducted in the rural commune of Suomussalmi in Kainuu province, an environmentally difficult and economically peripheral district of northeastern Finland. It was felt that a region with particularly severe constraints might throw the decision-making processes of farmers into relief. Borrowing from my earliest work among the Chipewyan, with whom I had become an active partner or sits'eni in hunting-trapping teams, in Finland I served as a general-purpose farm laborer or maatyolainen among several Suomussalmi families to gain familiarity with the microbehavior of farming in that locality.

Among dairy farmers in Suomussalmi, conflict resolution between women and men was an important dynamic in daily and longer-run decision making. In particular, women's expertise in cattle care was an important negotiating tool in gaining concessions from men in terms of work-load reductions, scheduling flexibility, and other relief during periods of high stress in the agicultural cycle. Such behaviors may be viewed as "adaptive strategies" which allowed women, and indeed entire family units, to cope with short-term stresses and perturbations in farm management. At another level, the actions of Suomussalmi farmwives were carving out new social and cultural definitions for women's status in the agricultural sector. This process was only embryonic since the traditional gender ideology revolving around rigid emanta/isanta (female farm head/male farm head) roles was still emotionally powerful, contributing to much ambivalence even among younger farmers. Nonetheless, the actions and attitudes of Suomussalmi farm women were, in part, attempts to reconcile the high moral value assigned to hard work in Finnish rural society, on the one hand, with forms of prestige and public recognition based on some sense of technical expertise and professionalism, on the other. Viewed from the perspective of "processual ecology," Suomussalmi agricultural society was developing as a system which mediates between individuals and their environments through the creation of behavioral alternatives.

Read more about it:

Jarvenpa, Robert. 1988 Agrarian Ecology, Sexual Organization of Labor and Decision Making in Northeastern Finland. In: The Social Implications of Agrarian Change in Northern and Eastern Finland. Tim Ingold, ed., pp. 76-90. Helsinki: The Finnish Anthropological Society.

Jarvenpa, Robert. 1989a Active Participation Methodology in Finnish Agricultural Research. Arctic Anthropology 26:1-19.

Jarvenpa, Robert. 1989b Unfamiliar Compatriots: Role Ambiguity in Finnish Field Research. Ethnos 1-2:31-44.