Beyond the Present: Politics and Future Imaginaries in Neo-Peasant Self-Managed Collectives (France, Italy, Spain)

Studying people's relationships to time and how these shape imaginaries is useful for understanding what motivates social practices. Based on long-term fieldwork among a dozen anarchist neo-farming collectives in France, Italy, and Spain, I will demonstrate how temporalities are a stake in the rural anarchist social struggle.

These neo-peasant collectives develop agricultural projects based on the mutualization of property and production tools. They establish practices of food self-sufficiency (market gardening, animal husbandry, product processing) and engage in emancipatory activities linked to self-construction, mechanics, and collective anti-authoritarian organization, while participating in networks of initiatives aimed at subverting capitalism and the State.

I will argue that projects aiming for rural withdrawal and food autonomy embody a paradoxical 'presentist' temporality that manifests in the existence of antinomic 'temporal horizons', both pessimistic and optimistic regarding the climate crisis and democracy.

If the ‘here and now’ becomes the privileged temporality, their rejection of grand, coherent, and linear narratives of social transformation and strategic universal struggle also feeds a taboo related to the biographical future. Aging and becoming less able-bodied within these collectives would indeed imply economic planning and precaution that is not taking into account. I will argue that the long-term future and presentism prevent inclusion and maintain structural social inequalities as validism, sexism and classism.

Drawing from this fieldwork, I will propose a broader epistemological discussion on how anthropology has historically conceptualized time, critiquing the bias of homogenization and ontologization in representations of time. I will advocate for a paradigm of multiple temporalities. Postulating that future temporalities can be multiple and non-linear within a social group invites us not only to understand incoherence and contradictions as inherent to social life, but also to study the hierarchies and power dynamics that structure social interactions.