The Egg and the Cull Hen. A New Way of Thinking Urban Agriculture under Covid-19 Time (Sarthe)
Debate on the reconfiguration of social and territorial relations in urban agriculture is a classic field of analysis around the issues raised on a global scale at the beginning of the 21st century, such as the damage of the environment and animal and plant biodiversity, the climate change, the lack of resources, and the economic insecurity. However, this question has never been raised with such acuteness as since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. Thanks to the confinement and an unprecedent ethnography gathered in the west of the Sarthe region gathered, I mobilize in this article the notion of disorder borrowed from Gregory Bateson. Such notion directly resonates with a photograph of the egg stall taken in a supermarket (Super U) on March 27, 2020. With this frozen picture, my intention is to reverse the focus by starting not from the actors but from the objects, and to thwart some of illusions such as the vegetation resulting from the work of the earth would be the only prism to think and “order” our conception of urban agriculture. Far from the city taken as a normative invariant because of its population, its urbanization and the type of activity, the egg and the cull hen reveal in a subtle way, through vernacular categories, other temporalities, other way of life and affective investments to the objects and spaces which re-articulate our ecological, economical, social and political understandings and categories until then unknown.