Being Neighbours: Cooperative Work and Rural Culture, 1830-1960

Resource type
Author/contributor
Title
Being Neighbours: Cooperative Work and Rural Culture, 1830-1960
Abstract
Throughout history, farm families have shared work and equipment with their neighbours to complete labour-intensive, time-sensitive, and time-consuming tasks. They benefitted materially and socially from these voluntary, flexible, loosely structured networks of reciprocal assistance, making neighbourliness a vital but overlooked aspect of agricultural change. Being Neighbours takes us into the heart of neighbourhood - the set of people near and surrounding the family - through an examination of work bees in Southern Ontario from 1830 to 1960. The "bee" was a special event where people gathered to work on a neighbour's farm like bees in a hive for a wide variety of purposes, including barn-raising, logging, threshing, quilting, turkey plucking, and apple paring. Drawing on the diaries of over one hundred men and women, Catharine Wilson takes readers into families' daily lives, the intricacies of their labour exchange, their workways, feasts, and hospitality. Through the prism of the bee and a close reading of the diaries, she uncovers the subtle social politics of mutual dependency, the expectations neighbours had of each other, and their ways of managing conflict and crisis. This book adds to the literature on cooperative work that focuses on evaluating its economic efficiency and complicates histories of capitalism that place communal values at odds with market orientation. Beautifully written, engaging, and richly detailed and illustrated, Being Neighbours reveals the visceral textures of rural life. -- Publisher's description
Series
McGill-Queen's rural, wildland, and resource studies series
Place
Montreal
Publisher
McGill-Queen's University Press
Date
2022
# of Pages
xvi, 432 pages: illustrations
Language
English
ISBN
978-0-228-01588-8
Short Title
Being Neighbours
Accessed
11/13/23, 4:08 PM
Library Catalog
Open WorldCat
Extra
OCLC: 1333205758
Citation
Wilson, C. A. (2022). Being Neighbours: Cooperative Work and Rural Culture, 1830-1960. McGill-Queen’s University Press. https://www.uoguelph.ca/arts/beingneighbours