Enclaves and Dilemmas of Rural Communication. Family Farmers and the Agricultural Press

Abstract

The present paper discusses, at the same time, a theoretical, historical and political thesis of rural communication which argues, on the one hand, that “the one who tills doesn’t read” and, on the other, that “the one who reads doesn’t till”. Our purpose is to analyze the representations of the countryside emergent from the quasi-interaction between the family farmers from the pampas of Córdoba and the texts of the commercial agricultural press, in a current context of a deepening of capitalism in the pampas agriculture and an increasing mediatization of Argentine rural life. We postulate that, within the framework of rural family farms’ transformations associated with these conditions, family farmers of southern Córdoba (Argentina) build, in the reception of agrarian newspaper supplements, convergent and divergent representations with their socio-productive strategies of expansion, maintenance and retraction. In this sense, the readings of this heterogeneous layer of agricultural producers about the positions of sense mediatized by the national and local commercial agricultural press both constitute enclaves of their social situation and install their own dilemmas about their contemporary condition.

Keywords: communication, family farmers, agricultural press, reception, development

Submission date: 2013-01-10
Acceptance date: 2013-05-15