Abstract
In this article, I analyse what happened to the concept of “family farming” during fieldwork-based research among quinteras families producing vegetables in a neighbourhood of southern peri-urban locality in Greater Buenos Aires. First, I explore how the development of the concept of “family farming” has been academically systematised as a result of a process of diffusion, to describe from my fieldwork situations how its conceptual uprooting became evident to me. I then examine the research of anthropologists who, in the exercise of nascent social anthropology in Argentina in the 1960s and 1970s, studied agrarian realities in different parts of the country, producing concepts and debates rooted in their fieldwork. In this framework, I analyse the analytical keys in which they used the notion of “family farm”. Through these pages, I propose to show that the concept of “family farming”, before operating analytically with its explanatory power to define who the quinteras and quinteros I met were and what they did, was rather part of the problem that I had the opportunity to interrogate during the research.