Local food and the nomadic ethical placemaking of the rural idyll: Towards a non-anthropocentric ‘rural of the future’

Abstract

The rural idyll is a geographical imagination envisioning a utopian escape from urban modernity and industrial values. However, this imaginary typically serves anthropocentric, neoliberal market logics, which landscape the rural as other. Alternative Food Networks (AFNs) may navigate this tension when committing to the ethico-political relocalisation of food systems. Drawing on Braidotti's nomadic ethics, this study develops a non-anthropocentric (new materialist and posthuman) understanding of the rural idyll, grounded in the narratives of local food consumers participating in AFNs in the Italian region of Marche. Based on 20 in-depth interviews, this research explores how participants' narratives can express a life-affirming desire that (re)configures the rural idyll as a not-yet-sustained condition of more-than-human rural spatial assemblages, providing a counter-point to the negative realities presently landscaping non-human nature as other. Findings show that these narratives contribute to the nomadic ethical placemaking of a non-anthropocentric rural idyll – a virtuality foregrounding a ‘rural of the future’ committed to fostering human and non-human intra-actions based on the ontological dissolution of the human subject in rural space. This process repositions non-human life discourse as ethico-politically central in agri-food practices and fosters a non-linear, inclusive reinterpretation of local food autochthony. Thus, this study contributes to food geographies and rural studies by showing how AFN-driven local food consumption can help overturn anthropocentric rural landscaping by positioning a non-anthropocentric idyllic image of non-human nature as a harbinger of alternative patterns of becoming, thereby opening up a novel, nomadic ethical understanding of placemaking possible rural futures