Sunday, March 16, 2014
Chairman's (Omni Shoreham)
Since at least Marx’s conceptualization of the household unit of production, the family as economic unit has seemed a thing of the past, marked by old-fashioned labor practices and sentimental and kin-based ties to past generations. But families are also inherently oriented towards the future, as they plan for, imagine, and seek to shape the trajectories of children and grandchildren. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among heritage food producers in northern Italy, this paper reconsiders the family as an economic unit geared towards the future: to make money, but also create livelihoods that will endure. It explores several intriguing paradoxes: an apparently traditional economic form that entrepreneurs use to gain modern prosperity; a modern economic form—able to utilize flexible labor and change quickly as the market demands—that, in the case of food producers, creates traditional cultural, or heritage, goods. In their efforts, family-based firms strive to build a semiotics of family, which draws on kinship- and place-based ties to construct meaning and increase value for their goods, such that for heritage food production, family becomes a brand, an economic strategy, and an affective unit, aimed toward effecting a ‘miraculous return’ to the period of prosperity and economic growth that characterized northern Italy in the decades following World War II. At a time of ongoing economic crisis in Italy as across Europe, however, the value of past traditions in contemporary food production is far from assured, and efforts to build a future upon heritage are always open to failure.
