The Intimate Geography of Family Farms

Abstract

This article describes the development of family farms within a Kipsigis community in western Kenya. In Kenya, throughout rural Africa, and elsewhere in the “developing world,” family farms figure as key discursive and geographic spaces where the “development process” is located (see Crehan and von Oppen 1988, McCracken 1982, Ferguson 1990). Family farms are hybrid spaces where individual, local, state-based, and various “expert” visions of development intersect. They have the added virtue of being places whose geographic, historical and cultural specificity makes them accessible to ethnographic description.Of course the same applies to family farms everywhere. Quite distinctive forms of “the family farm” exist in different regions of France, the United States, and other places in the “developed” world. Despite the presumed leveling effects of modernization, such regional differences show few signs of disappearing (see Rogers 1991).