Cultivating Lost Land: Livelihood and Depopulation on São Jorge Island, Azores ...

• Main Author: Burger, Tim
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Apollo - University of Cambridge Repository 2023
• Subjects: agriculture; Azores; depopulation; livelihood; rural economy; value; Jorge Island
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.17863/cam.104550; https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/362251

This ethnography of rural social life on São Jorge Island, Azores, examines the interconnections between depopulation, people’s practices of material livelihood, and their understandings of their overall historical and social condition. Following decades of transatlantic outmigration and demographic decline, subsistence farmers in my main fieldsite, the village of ‘Fajã’, shared a focus on overall decay. However, they evaluated and lived out what I call ‘depopulated social relations’ in different and conflicting ways. This study explores the heterogeneous range of reflexive, hands-on, and often counterintuitive modes in which island residents organized their historical consciousness around the social reproduction of agrarian livelihoods in unfavourable circumstances. My interlocutors’ central predicament was that their intensely valued agrarian land was being overgrown by brushwood. They often described this land as “already lost” (*já perdido*). Watching the physical change of their gardens and terraces was ...