Slash-and-burn Agriculture and Garageniks: Parallel Practices, Resource Appropriation, and Everyday Structures of Invisible Lives

Abstract

This article provides a comparative analysis in the form of a parallel reading of two texts: the first text is devoted to the description of slash-and-burn agriculture among Eastern Slavs and Russians, the second analyzes the economic practices of garageniks – people engaged in handicraft and manufacturing in garages in many cities of Russia. The discussions among anthropologists regarding the transition to agriculture is presented in the context of why humanity did not advance to the stage of sustainable agricultural techniques for a long time. In many ways, the work is a development of James Scott’s and David Graeber’s ideas about the historical roots of the shadow economy. In identifying parallels in the activities of the forest farmers of that era and modern garageniks, the author comes to a number conclusions. Garageniks and the shifting farming residents of the Russian Plain have one basic similarity: they are at least partly invisible to the state. Here it is legitimate to speak about the rootedness of both economic structures in “the structures of reality” (Braudel’s term) – grassroots practices that, as a rule, escape the gaze of state statisticians. Both nominal social communities are characterized by the complex, multidisciplinary, and non-trivial nature of their activity, which rejects specialization, a developed division of labor, and long-term planning. This type of activity is not aimed at increasing economic efficiency, but at finding and developing a “nobody’s” resource. This determines the complex nature of the localization of economic activity, dictated by many factors: forest farmers are forced to periodically change their plots; garageniks are forced to adapt to the economic specialization of a specific garage cooperative. In both communities, the artel method of organizing labor predominates, requiring all participants to contribute labor, including the owner of the means of production. The latter is consistent with the medieval views of the Scholastics on the nature of labor and capital. The distributed nature of economic practices and the invisibility of forest farmers and garageniks to the state naturally coincide with limited property rights to fixed assets  – land plots and garages, respectively. A possible explanation for the similarity of the behavioral patterns of such chronologically widely separated social communities is the tendency toward a two-part social life identified in different local communities. This is indirectly confirmed by the stable share of the informal sector in the Russian economy, which did not change with the external economic shocks of 2014 and 2022, nor on the tightening of the fight against economic crime.