In the summer of 2020, as I was conducting fieldwork in my home village in the southern Austrian Alps, I noticed something peculiar. Amidst the turmoils of the COVID-19 pandemic, as the country was struggling with rising infection numbers and the shutdown of key industries, the figure of the mountain farmer was omni-present. Initially hailed by government and media for upkeeping the security of food supply, the heroization of this figure soon came to take on a life of its own. A large number of village inhabitants started to claim the image of the mountain peasant for themselves—including people with no obvious connections to this profession. In her well-known essay Susana Narotzky (2016) posed the question “Where have all the peasants gone?” attempting to detect the leftovers of this key trope of progressive thought in the twenty-first-century—a complex figure imbued with both, vulnerability vis-à-vis capitalist forces and a strong sense of autonomy. The sudden proliferation of peasant imageries in my home village in the wake of the pandemic provoked me to ask the opposite question, namely: “Have we all become farmers now”?

This shift was peculiar, given that the number of workers classified as cultivators in the region had been in steep decline for several decades. Between 1995, the year Austria joined the European Union, and 2022, the number of farms in the state of Carinthia decreased by 35 percent. Most of the farmers still active are only doing so on a part-time basis. Seventy percent of the farmers in the Nock Mountain region are not able to make a living from the small-scale agricultural practices common to the Alps and organize their farms alongside full-time jobs. Throughout the decades, the figure of the farmer therefore slowly blended in with everybody else living in this rural part of Austria. With the owners of farms mainly becoming associated with the trades they worked in, there was little that set them apart from other occupations. The low rank peasants had historically occupied in the socio-economic make-up of this region had attracted them to embrace the higher status attached to the skilled trades they worked in while hiding away their agricultural roots. In the wake of the pandemic, however, this hierarchy of occupations changed. Rather than seeing farmers as representatives of a past way of life, they came to be celebrated as true natives with a deep sense of connection to people and land. Where blue collar workers could at most claim to be representatives of the “ordinary” working population, the figure of the farmer was imbued with the authority to speak for the wider community. Villagers started to embrace these peasant imaginaries of self-sufficiency and autonomy, even those who did not live on a farm.

This became particularly apparent in the mushrooming of so-called Selbstbedienungshütten, self-service huts selling home-made and farm produce such as eggs, butter, milk, bread, cheese, meat, jam, honey, cakes, and ready-made meals. Initiated by local inhabitants, the self-built wooden huts were usually positioned in front of private properties. Opened 24/7, customers could enter the unstaffed mini shops anytime and pay for the produce they bought by leaving money in a jar. Entirely based on mutual trust, the main narrative circulating in the villages was that these huts offered local farmers the opportunity to sell their produce directly, without having to accept prize cuts or getting caught up in the pressuring tactics of supermarket chains.

The first hut in the region had been initiated by a collective of farmers and village inhabitants a couple of years earlier. Yet, in 2020 huts started to pop up everywhere. By the end of the year, a dozen mini-stores had established themselves—an astonishing number for a municipality with a population of just 3,460, scattered across 19 mountain communities. Out-migration and the small-scale nature of the villages had long been the source of infrastructural problems in the region, with supermarket chains, banks, and other providers closing shops decades ago. Villagers have since had to travel long distances to reach stores in larger catchment areas. However, none of the profitability arguments made by the supermarket chains seemed to be an issue for the initiators of the self-service huts. From day one, every single one of them thrived.  Residents enthusiastically embraced these initiatives, to the point that the nearest-by big supermarket even considered putting up a self-service hut selling locally sourced produce in front of their store to prevent customers from changing their shopping habits permanently.

While some of the huts were run by farmers, many of them were not. One of the most popular shops was organized by a woman who sold produce from her permaculture garden, others were run by villagers who sold homemade bread or cakes. While these villagers did not own farmland and usually worked in blue-collar professions, they presented their work through peasant imageries of self-sufficiency and connection to the land. Throughout my fieldwork, I observed the enthusiastic support these projects received from within the community (Lems 2023). The pandemic accelerated these dynamics. It forced me to take note of the important social role peasant imaginaries can take on as a means of creating a sense of belonging and solidarity in “forgotten,” rural places that are marked by unemployment, defunding, and out-migration. These imaginaries linked into globally circulating narratives historically promoted by progressive agricultural movements such as Via Campesina or Slow Food that celebrate peasants as honest, hard-working, and uncorrupted “people of the land” (Narotzky 2016, 305). This idealistic figure does not just ensure the sovereignty of food production. As a worker of the land, it has an intimate relationship to its surroundings, imbuing it with the moral authority to speak and act for the greater good of the community.

The spread of these progressive ideas in an area that has a long history of support for conservative and right-wing movements was intriguing. Yet, my fieldwork highlighted the importance of inquiring into the sense of agency attached to such imaginaries, laying bare the ambiguous nature of their supposedly anti-capitalist nature. It made visible the contours of a troubling politics of place also attached to the peasant figure. This politics of place did not just speak out against extractivist capitalism. Based on historically engrained notions of otherness, it had the side-effect of reproducing exclusionary ideas of belonging. The peasant imaginaries circulating in the villages were underwritten by a strong common sense that the government was not to be trusted as it was working against its own people (Lems 2022).

While many villagers supported the ideas of autonomy attached to the figure of the farmer, they did not necessarily direct them towards progressive future visions. Above all, they were driven by the imagined need to save the community from the threat of cultural extinction. Amongst the participants of these grassroots agricultural projects, the idea of the “globalist” paradigm attempting to destroy local traditions and lifestyles was widespread. Narratives of the European Union as a representative of this globalist paradigm went hand in hand with stories about green elites enforcing their environmental agendas on the lives of “everyday men and women.” While some participants in the food sovereignty movement sympathized with green party politics, the majority saw it as their task to act against cosmopolitan elites and actively work towards a future devoid of human and natural intruders.

The politicization of the farmer figure by authoritarian movements in the United States and across Europe in the post-pandemic political landscape makes abundantly clear that the contradictory peasant imageries circulating in my home village should not be written off as confused sentiments emerging from Austria’s backwaters. The villagers’ imaginaries link into the contradictoriness of widely shared tropes, that simultaneously champion the figure of the peasant as a symbol of resistance against capitalist ruination and an emissary of a new, anti-cosmopolitan world order. If we are to understand the social dynamics underwriting the on-going descent into authoritarianism, we need to attend to this ambiguity. I agree with Narotzky’s (2016, 302) suggestion that it is precisely the ideological versatility of the peasant figure and its “complex relations with capital and the state” that makes it such an important concept for our times. In an era marked by social and ecological ruination, the ambiguous status of “dependent autonomy” this figure is imbued with extends beyond the social world of farmers (Narotzky 2016, 302). It is an experience that is shared by an ever-growing number of people across the world.