Anya Workman ’25 Immerses Herself in Farm Life For Anthropology Project
By Andrea Becker ’26
This summer, Anya Workman received a Riley Research Award from the anthropology department to conduct ethnographic fieldwork on two smallholder farms in rural Minnesota.
Advised by Assistant Professor of Anthropology Willi Lempert, Workman explored how mutual aid, kinship, and gender roles shape the labor and community connections essential to smallholder farming. She worked on two Minnesota farms, in Aitkin and in Duluth, as a volunteer with the World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF), an organization that connects small farms with volunteers who learn and work in exchange for board and lodging.
“I immersed myself in farm life, working alongside the farmers while taking detailed field notes and writing sensory vignettes,” she said, using skills and practices she learned in Bowdoin’s anthropology classes. She is an anthropology and digital and computational studies major.
Over the course of her stay, Workman’s observations led her to see how necessary connections between people were in all stages of farm work. She addressed the common misperception that farming solely focuses on planting and harvesting. “What people do not think about is all the other aspects that go into farming,” she said.
She recalls a moment driving with one of the farm leads and listening to his conversation with a restaurant owner he hoped would buy his lettuce. After the conversation, he told Workman it was imperative to build relationships with customers.
Yet, these connections, while critical, can be an afterthought on a farm when there is so much other work to be done. In the end, however, small farms can only exist because of social networks linking market vendors, neighbors, owners, and farmhands. Beyond monetary exchanges, these networks often function as mutual aid and forms of reciprocity, Workman said.
“For example, market vendors would often give other vendors products they had left over at the end of the market,” she said. “The WWOOF program itself creates an ambiguous relationship between WWOOFer and host in which the WWOOFer is not an employee because they are not paid, but are expected to work. Further, WWOOFers become much more entangled with the lives of the hosts because they are living and eating together.”
Both a personally meaningful and intellectually focused project, the notes and vignettes Workman compiled during her time in Minnesota will inform her independent study this fall. “Overall, my experiences this summer provided an incredible opportunity to practice ethnographic methods in the field while experiencing life on rural Minnesota farms,” she said.
Lempert praised Workman for her thoughtful project and for what she brings to the community. “Some students you think back on as not only smart and capable but as an animating force,” he said. “You are happy they are going to go out into the world that is complicated and difficult; it makes you feel optimistic and hopeful. Anya is one of these students.”