Cultivating farm life on the borders: Scottish hill sheep farms and the European Community

Analyses of farming in Britain are dominated by the issue of whether and to what extent family farms are or are becoming capitalist enterprises. This paper develops an alternative conceptualization of the social location of family farms within the UK and the European Community. The hill sheep farm of the Scottish borderlands is a distinct 'field' situated between the agricultural policies of the European Community and the culturally constructed 'natural' conditions of land and sheep. In this location, farmers are not the bystanders to an assumed inevitable domination by capitalist logic and meaning, but active agents in creating a distinctive social life, characterized by resistance to, independence from and dependence upon the United Kingdom and European Community. The primary condition for such an apparently contradictory relation is a 'technological ontology' suffusing both farmers' practices and EC agricultural policy.