Abstract
This chapter shows how new reporting requirements for farmers as well as the new integration of databases are leading farmers to change their practices. The data farmers are now required to supply are being used to produce statistics about agriculture, but this process is also changing agriculture. The relationship between statistics and agriculture—and hence rural livelihoods—is thus a performative one. The chapter reviews work on performativity, substantivist approaches to economy and livelihoods, and economization. It is in and through performativity that much of the work of institutional commensuration between Turkey and the EU is actually happening. The attempt to “know” agriculture through new data systems is in fact changing agriculture itself.
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- 1.
On the notion of markets being “free” anywhere as largely a fiction see Chang 2010.
- 2.
A classic example is saying “I do” as part of one’s wedding ceremony. The speaker is not describing something (it would not make sense for someone to interject, “that is false”); she is trying to do something, in this case get married. Ultimately, work in this area would deconstruct the stability of the distinction between performative and so-called constative (descriptive) language use, e.g. even the terms we employ in making seeming constative utterances only mean what they do because of the history of the way those terms have been used. Both those uses and terms’ meanings are in a constant state of flux, pointing to an inherent undecideability and instability in language use itself (Derrida 1982). Work influenced by pragmatics in linguistics has at times come to be in dialogue with pragmatic approaches in (post)philosophy as well, especially building on the work of Dewey, the later Wittgenstein, and Rorty.
- 3.
The literature in this vein is now large and rapidly growing. A good overview is in MacKenzie et al. 2007.
- 4.
A classic statement of this position is Marshall Sahlins’ The use and abuse of biology: An anthropological critique of sociobiology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1976.
- 5.
- 6.
Marglin has reflected on his several decades of teaching in a prominent economics department at a prestigious US university that it used to be the case that the discipline of economics studied the ways different kinds of economic arrangements worked. More recently, he writes, “[economics] provides the justification for building a world based on markets” (ix).
- 7.
For a discussion of “the place of the economy in Turkish society” centered around an argument for the importance of shifts in reciprocity even in ostensibly market exchanges, see Buğra (2003).
- 8.
See Chakrabarty’s (2007) discussion of two ways of reading Marx on the relationship between capital and its outside, in his chapter “Two Histories of Capital”.
- 9.
He told me that his own areas of specialization were in information systems and market research.
- 10.
In Hungary, he noted, when he worked there on establishing their FADN as they prepared for EU accession, they had around one million farms, but only 20,000 in the FADN.
- 11.
The EU expert noted, for instance, that they had not yet encountered a farmer whom they wanted to work with but who was not literate. Compare with the early twentieth century “Reporter” system for compiling agriculture statistics in the pre-New Deal United States discussed in Didier 2020.
- 12.
The FADN project legally cannot forward the data it collects to any other entity; but the ÇKS can and does share its data with other entities, like the tax bureau or social security.
- 13.
This visit was video recorded and posted online at https://youtu.be/wtnqzRnUkmk (accessed 20 July 2017).
- 14.
In the context of the early 2000s this AKP disparaging of the authoritarianism of the CHP of the 1930s and 1940s was an attempt to align the AKP with liberal democracy at the expense of the secularist establishment, by drawing a line between them and democracy. After 2008 the CHP would more stridently direct accusations of authoritarianism at the AKP itself.
- 15.
The Turkish phrase often repeated was the negative, kurtarmıyor, “it’s not worth it/you can’t get by [on it].”
- 16.
This is a large and complex issue. Partially for reasons of longstanding, regional socio-economic structures (large landowners) that are less common in other parts of the country, partially due to the armed conflict between the state and Kurdish separatist forces starting in the 1980s and the state’s arming and rewarding its local proxies at the expense of those who did not take up arms on its side, precisely who legitimately owns what land is a thornier problem in the Southeast of the country than elsewhere. This is now coming to a head (sometimes violently) precisely as the infrastructures for recording and registering are being better integrated across data systems.
- 17.
There are schools of thought at odds with the small-is-inefficient formula; for a classic statement of “the smallholder alternative,” arguing that smallholder intensive agriculture by farming family households is economically efficient, ecologically sustainable and reduces social risk, see Netting 1993. More recently, population pressures, falling commodity prices, and land consolidation and resulting difficulties in households accessing it, in a context of accelerated climate change, have no doubt complicated Netting’s argument. See also C. Miller 2005.
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Silverstein, B. (2020). Performativity, Economy and the Remaking of Agriculture. In: The Social Lives of Numbers. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9196-9_4
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