‘Nature’ as a Promise of Happiness: Farmers’ Wives in the Area of Ammerland, Germany

In this qualitative study about the culture and counterculture of farmers’ wives, seventeen women were interviewed over the course of three years. The premise on which the analysis of there interviews was carried out was that they had to be taken as ‘language games’ (Wittgenstein) of individual self‐descriptions. The material was used to extract individual collages of consciousness. The question was how it is possible to direct one’s behaviour in a way that is different from the usual in the sense that one not only fulfils duties and normative expectations but is also able to experience and live desires, temptations, fantasies. It appeared that these women view themselves as ‘seekers of knowledge’ with particular world views and concerned with specific questions of meaning. Cultural change was traced in the realms of work, bodily attitudes, food and nature. One crucial result is that culture has no continuity for these women, but must be permanently re‐established.