Moral Appreciation: Caring for Post-socialist Cows in Contemporary Serbia

This ethnographic case study, building on long-term participant observation in Serbia, tackles the relationship of the state and the regional economy during the transformations from self-managed socialism to late capitalism. Embedding the work relations of small-scale dairy farmers from central Serbia in wider moral economic relations, it develops the notion of ‘moral appreciation’. On the one hand, moral appreciation is external to the dairy households, as many neighbours who disinvested from dairy production support those who invested-through labour exchanges, by renting land cheaply, and by praising their frugality. On the other hand, the dairy farmers themselves struggle to domesticate the post-socialist assemblage of changing standards and novel supply chains. Relationally speaking, moral appreciation encompasses salvaging value from the devalued substance of work-past and present-to reproduce the future ‘living village’. This adaptive process to capitalist substance-transformation is potentially paralleled in many other spheres of the capitalist world economy.