Small -Scale Farms, Large-Scale Politics: The Changing Landscape of Rural Lithuania

209 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2006.This dissertation examines how the implementation of the European Union's (EU) agricultural reforms map onto the rural landscape of post-socialist Lithuania. In it, I focus on how attempts to Europeanize the countryside in Lithuania are interacting with small-scale farmers' practices and identities. Through an ethnography utilizing official reports, archival data and media representations, this project provides an historical analysis of how farmers have constructed their relationship to the land and how this relationship is being reshaped by the most recent reforms. I have found that under socialism, when working on their subsidiary farms, the farmers built autonomous socio-material spaces and developed highly personalized relationships to the land by finely tuning the use of scarce resources. The implementation of the EU's agricultural reforms is challenging the farmers' intimate connection to the land and their local definitions what constitutes "good" and "real" farming and, with this, the foundations of locally sustainable agriculture.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD