Growing, guarding, and generous exchange in an analogue sharing economy

Sharing economies hold significant potential to unsettle dominant capitalist economic relations and to inspire more responsible and collaborative ways of utilising resources. Recent, prolific writing on the topic in geography, however, tends to prioritise novel, digitally mediated and often for-profit iterations of the ‘on-demand’ economy over the lived experience of sharing and its relationship with activist praxis. Centring on the everyday, ‘analogue’ practice of sharing in communities of gardeners concerned with conserving agricultural biodiversity and reviving the skill of seed saving, this paper interrogates the relationship between mundane performances of sharing, the circulation of material items and the micro-political. With reference to original ethnographic research with gardeners involved in seed conservation and exchange in the UK, I argue sharing is a way to understand economy through everyday practice, offering opportunities for the enactment of economic diversity and critique of neoliberal food and seed systems. Via the themes of growing and guarding, I show that the circulation of seeds and garden produce can galvanise diverse economic dispositions, communities of connected growers and cultures of non-monetary exchange. Sharing is conceptualised not as a distinctly altruistic, non-reciprocal social practice but as ‘generous exchange’: a practice and discourse that draws together and renders legible a range of interwoven practical concerns, enthusiasms, and material and interpersonal relationships. I suggest it is vital to interrogate the mundane, material dimensions of diverse sharing economies in order to understand the role of reciprocity in transforming relationships with natural resources and commodities, and in generating temporally and spatially extended practices of care and communality.