Showing and telling farming: agricultural shows and re-imaging British agriculture
2004
Holloway, L.
Some actors in the "mainstream" agricultural sector are beginning to engage in strategies of influencing public perceptions of farming, responding to public anxieties over industrialised agriculture and to a supposed separation of non-farming publics from food production. This paper focuses on agricultural shows as sites and events central to such re-imaging strategies: shows are moments of convergence, assembling farming people, entities, knowledges and practices, and non-farming publics, and allowing agricultural societies to stage managed encounters between farming and non-farmers. The paper draws on research with show managers and others involved in agricultural shows. It discusses how a reorientation of shows' presentation of farming to the non-farming public has occurred. While there is a continued display of farming as a spectacle, there are also attempts by agricultural societies to use shows to foster a sense of connectedness between the public and farming, and to 'inform' or 'educate' the public, on their terms, about farming. However, first, in several ways, shows reproduce a distancing and separation between farming and non-farmers, partly due to a partial evacuation of much mainstream agricultural content from some shows, and to the restricted and selective image of farming which is presented. Second, processes of informing and educating non-farming publics and imaging farming in particular ways, are, in addition, associated with a re-imaging of farming to farmers. The reorientation of agricultural shows towards a re-imaging of agriculture can be understood as 'acting back' on farming's perception of itself. Shows thus also involve a reflexive repositioning of farmers in relation to the consumers of their products.
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