I approached Sjef and Betsie’s farm on a rainy day in February, a detached brick house, three large stables behind it. Betsie stood outside emptying the mailbox. She greeted me warmly and took my arm to lead me inside. We sat down in the kitchen where I talked to Sjef and Betsie about how they experienced changes in their farm in the past half century.
Sjef and Betsie own a pig farm in de Peel, the landscape my current research centres on. This will form part of my dissertation on the transregional environmental history of soybeans in Brazil and the Netherlands. Soybeans historically connected places as they were planted, shipped, and consumed. To grasp their specific entanglements, I study the history of soybeans in situated places, and on different scales. Soybeans act as plants, commodities, an ingredient of feedstuff, a protein source and even on a molecular level as embodied nitrogen. To understand this multi-sited and multi-scalar history of soybeans, my research relies on oral histories such as the one of Sjef and Betsie. Through them, I connect the history of global exchanges with specific landscapes soybeans became entangled with. I am particularly interested in how the reliance on imported proteins changed rhythms of farming and engaging with the landscape in de Peel.
Temporalities, the different temporal logics to which beings adhere form the rhythms of historical landscapes which are constantly in the making.[1] They become particularly explicit in studies of agriculture. Successful farming practice means attuning and manipulating multiple rhythms of growth and decline.[2] It means synchronizing human and non-human labour to privilege certain species over others. In oral history, however, a predominant frame has been asking for somebody’s life story. This might obscure the multiple rhythms of historical experience as interviewer and narrator create a supposedly linear narrative. In the following, I collected a few thoughts on how to move beyond that.
I experimented with reinforcing anecdotal ways of storytelling and asked about the practices, and repetitions in the narrator’s stories. Through this approach, I learned about the multiple ways in which Sjef farmed over the years. Imported animal feed allowed him to become more independent of the unexpected changes of the landscape, it changed working routines and interactions between animals and farmer. Although he preferred to talk about his own entrepreneurial sense, the importance of imported feedstuff shimmered through his account. It created a perceived autonomy that allowed Sjef and Betsie to imagine their farm as detached from outside rhythms such as seasonal change or changing water levels and tell their story remaining within its spatial confines.
Although not part of their narrative, their farming practices caused nitrogen emissions leaking into their surroundings, the largely drained peatland of de Peel. As conservationists started fighting for the restoration of the peatland, Sjef and Betsie could no longer ignore the landscape outside of their farm. They criticized the rewetting of the peatland and efforts to protect it from nitrogen emissions arguing that the nitrogen emissions that farming caused were merely a consequence of history unfolding in a linear manner. Rewetting and conserving, according to them, would make de Peel fall outside of this “natural” progress of time. This is indicative of how the influx of soybeans partially enabling high nitrogen emissions changed the way Sjef and Betsie perceived the rhythms of change in their surroundings and made sense of their own place in them.
After the interview ended, Sjef showed me their stables. This caused a new performance of the oral history interaction. The walk directed our conversation towards non-linear accounts as it was our pace and the objects we encountered that structured the talk, adding new instruments to the “orchestra” producing the oral history act beyond orality.[3] When we walked past the stables, Sjef resorted to his own account of the rhythms of farming, the intervals at which pigs are born, fed and slaughtered. He weaved together stories of how it used to be with descriptions of the current practices on the farm. Site and story converged towards a multisensorial and multitemporal experience in which stories of the past rippled through the materiality of the present.
Oral history combined with insights from walking methods and sensory ethnography allowed me to understand Sjef and Betsie’s story as an entry point into how imported raw materials such as soybeans infused landscapes and changed the rhythms of farms, their relationships to wider landscapes, and how people imagined their histories through these changing landscapes.
This non-linear approach to oral histories raises questions of how we account for ourselves in historical knowledge production. If we acknowledge the material surroundings of oral history acts as agents, the narrator and interviewer are no longer contained entities but shaped by and in dialogue with their surroundings and multiple temporal layers. This perspective can potentially be transformative in understanding how oral history production engages with multiple rhythms that impacted a person’s actions and historical consciousness and move beyond the life story as a temporal frame for oral history production.
Abrams, Lynn. Oral History Theory. 2 ed. London: Routledge, 2016.
Bray, Francesca, Barbara Hahn, John Bosco Lourdusamy, and Tiago Saraiva. Moving Crops and the Scales of History. Yale Agrarian Studies Series. Edited by James C. Scott. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2023.
Ingold, Tim. “The Temporality of the Landscape.” World Archaeology 25, no. 2 (1993): 152-74.
Van Der Straeten, Jonas. “The Rhythms Behind Change: Historiography and the Temporality of Non-Western Technological Landscapes.” Technikgeschichte 88, 2 (2021): 191-96.
[1] Jonas Van Der Straeten, “The Rhythms Behind Change: Historiography and the Temporality of Non-Western Technological Landscapes,” Technikgeschichte 88, 2 (2021): 192; Tim Ingold, “The Temporality of the Landscape,” World Archaeology 25, no. 2 (1993): 172.
[2] Francesca Bray, Barbara Hahn, John Bosco Lourdusamy, and Tiago Saraiva, Moving Crops and the Scales of History, ed. James C. Scott, Yale Agrarian Studies Series, (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2023), 3.
[3] Lynn Abrams, Oral History Theory, 2 ed. (London: Routledge, 2016), 132-33.