Feminist Knowledge Claims, Local Knowledge, and Gender Divisions of Agricultural Labor: Constructing a Successor Science¹

Abstract

Abstract Issues raised by the feminist epistemic critique of social science are used to examine what is meant by local knowledge and its contribution to analyses of agricultural sustainability. Employing the concepts of partial perspective, lived experience, and the complexity of social context, this paper focuses attention on the juxtaposition of local and scientific knowledge and challenges those interpretations of local knowledge production that ignore the various people, relations, and interests constituting the rural economy. An examination of local as a contested, complex, and heterogeneous domain refines the work of Kloppenburg (1991) and his commitment to the significance of local knowledge in constructing opportunities for sustainable agriculture. Attention to the on‐farm gender division of labor helps to identify gender differences as critical in constituting the family farm and to elaborate how the different experiences of women and men may offer alternative visions of what constitutes sustainable agricultural production.