Tumbledown Farmer visited the not-so-tumbledown farms at Conner Prairie today with his family. Here the skills so necessary to life in the 19th and early 20th centuries are learned not from the study of books but from the daily practice of staff and volunteers. (OK, yes, ultimately these practices must be teased from research into that past, which can only come from the study of documents and artifacts, but they are experienced by the visitor as living practices.)
The visit reminded Tumbledown of Gene Logsdon's (The Contrary Farmer's) contention that farms and farmers of the traditional type, with diversity of crops and livestock, require "many other cottage industries" (mechanics, welders, and the like) in order to survive (p. 34). It does indeed "take a village"--represented at Conner Prairie by a pottery, a blacksmith's shop, a general store, a doctor, a carpenter, a weaver, a school, an inn, and a meeting house-- and a whole host of "cooperative" skills to support a small farm. Where is that support today? Logsdon contends that "back-to-the-land" moves most often fail not because the farmers are stupid or incompetent, but because "their homesteads [are] islands in an alien culture" (Living at Nature's Pace, p. 99). The community and skill sets represented by the living history museum (living/museum, isn't that a contradiction in terms?) at Conner Prairie are deemed quaint and easily quarantined onto tracts of land where they may be visited like an amusement park. The skills are there to be observed, but not to be learned and taken home for implementation. Perhaps if we went to school at Conner Prairie, we could rebuild our Tumbledown Farm.
No comments:
Post a Comment