Abstract

GONZALEZ VELEZ, César Augusto; MONTENEGRO RIVEROS, Mauricio  and  GARCIA GONZALEZ, David Fernando. "I buy farm products": an approach to the social representations of farmers' market consumers. Rev. colomb. soc. [online]. 2018, vol.41, n.2, pp.61-81. ISSN 0120-159X.  https://doi.org/10.15446/rcs.v41n2.70136.

The article presents the findings of the research project "Social Representations in Bogota's Farmers' Market Consumption Practices", carried out in 2017 by researchers from Universidad Central. The paper describes the context of the farmers' market program, a space where multiple actors and interests converge and that in recent years has constantly asserted the discourse of food justice and alternative economies. It also analyzes urban consumers' social representations of farmers, which play a role in the interactions and consumption practices that take place in the markets. In writing the article, we used fragments of buyers' discourses, collected through semi-structured interviews with visitors. Our work is based on the concept of social representations, as revised from the perspectives of sociology and social psychology, since it makes it possible to address the manner in which a social group reproduces a way of understanding, knowing, and relating to other social subjects and objects. Since representations have an impact on social actions, they facilitate the analysis of culture, both as an idea and as a practice. The structure of the article is the following: first, it provides a historical contextualization of farmers' markets, and then goes on to describe the methodological aspects of the research project. The following section carries out an analysis of consumers' knowledge and motivations regarding farmers' markets; the economic profits of sellers from the point of view of consumers; and the identification of buyers with the farmers selling their products. Finally, the last section summarizes the main points of the article in order to open up spaces for discussion and a broader dialogue with other researchers.

Keywords : consumption; farmers' markets; social representations; social studies of consumption.

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