Hawkesbury Harvest : panacea, paradox and the spirit of capitalism in the rural hinterlands of Sydney, Australia

Abstract

This study presents a phenomenological exposition of Hawkesbury Harvest (Harvest), a community-based, not-for-profit that formed in the year 2000 to address the systemic threats to farming in the Sydney Basin, threats to farm viability, and community health issues related to changes in the food system. Revealed from the perspectives of its four longest-serving actors and taking a grounded inductive stance within an emancipatory research paradigm, the study documents and interprets Harvest's archeo-legacies in the Sydney development dialogue. Within institutional settings there were no linkages between policy and action and the challenges Harvest actors recognized affecting agriculture, food, farming and health. The 'panacea' that tourism is promoted to be by government gave Harvest access to neo-liberal programs of support capable of creating the links, the nexus between Sydney's future and a future for farming, and so Harvest's first funded initiative was a Farm Gate Trail. Harvest began a process of communicative action expressed through a range of economic initiatives which created agri-tourism, open farms, farmer markets and food events. These engaged the wider Sydney community through experiential animations in a critical and paradoxical dialogue about urban development, food, health and farming with a core message that farming in the Sydney Basin needed to be retained and protected, for the sake of both rural community and city dwellers. A repertoire of messages developed that are contingent on a dynamic engagement with Sydney's development discourse, messages that have evolved and self-reference Harvest in the prosecution of its dialectic. This phenomenology presents empirical evidence for Harvest as a 'carrier' (after Weber) of moral imperatives in support of agriculture in the Sydney Basin. As a place-based reaction to global forces it made possible the expression of its actors' personal 'calling' into service for a greater good and mobilized discourses about local food systems, regional identity, cultural landscape and local farming mythology as components in its agri-cultural economic initiatives. This placist dialectic activated and harnessed the classic Weberian conundrum of formal versus substantive rationality, and gave expression to Weber's own concession about rationality, that without a teleology, a values-informed rationality, it simply reinforces what he famously described as the Iron Cage of modernity. Harvest's mechanisms make available the expression of a spirit in capitalism, one Weber believed would be snuffed out in a secularized world, but one which we can still find in the small places that throw up resistance to the Iron Cage in forms like Hawkesbury Harvest.

Date of Award	2013
Original language	English