Being Neighbours

Cooperative Work and Rural Culture, 1830–1960

Catharine Anne Wilson

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780228015888
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Throughout history, farm families have shared work and equipment with their neighbours to complete labour-intensive, time-sensitive, and time-consuming tasks. They benefitted materially and socially from these voluntary, flexible, loosely structured networks of reciprocal assistance, making neighbourliness a vital but overlooked aspect of agricultural change. Being Neighbours takes us into the heart of neighbourhood – the set of people near and surrounding the family – through an examination of work bees in southern Ontario from 1830 to 1960. The bee was a special event where people gathered to work on a neighbour's farm like bees in a hive for a wide variety of purposes, including barn raising, logging, threshing, quilting, turkey plucking, and apple paring. Drawing on the diaries of over one hundred men and women, Catharine Wilson takes readers into families' daily lives, the intricacies of their labour exchange, and their workways, feasts, and hospitality. Through the prism of the bee and a close reading of the diaries, she uncovers the subtle social politics of mutual dependency, the expectations neighbours had of each other, and their ways of managing conflict and crisis. This book adds to the literature on cooperative work that focuses on evaluating its economic efficiency and complicates histories of capitalism that place communal values at odds with market orientation. Beautifully written, engaging, and richly detailed and illustrated, Being Neighbours reveals the visceral textures of rural life.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Bee-ing Neighbours
• 1 Busy Bees: The Types of Bees, Their Frequency, and Work Processes
• 2 The Bee Network: Inclusion, Household Engagement, and Equalizing the Exchange
• 3 The Quilting Bee: Time, Space, Neighbourhood Aesthetics, and Collective Memory
• 4 “Yo Heave” – The Spirit of Increase: Raising the Barn, Agricultural Practise, Hospitality, and Collective Memory
• 5 Threshing Bees: New Technologies and Business Arrangements
• 6 “If There Is Honey, the Bees Will Come”: Foodways and Foodscapes of Plenty
• 7 Killer Bees: Accidents, Violence, and Timely Resolutions
• 8 Buzzing Off: The Decline of Bees
• Conclusion: Wrap-Up and Legacy
• Appendix A: Table of Diarists
• Appendix B: Tables
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index