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.
