Joan Gross

Capitalism and Its Discontents: Back-to-the-Lander and Freegan Foodways in Rural Oregon

During an assessment of food needs and habits in rural Western Oregon, back-to-the-landers and freegans emerged as two groups that resist the global industrial food system by tapping into pre-capitalist subsistence patterns. Subsistence agriculture provides the inspiration for back-to-the-landers while freegans are akin to modern day foragers, living off the waste of others and on what they can gather in the wild. In this article, I describe the foodways of these two groups and suggest ways in which they might help articulate a post-capitalist food economy, using the work of J. K. Gibson-Graham and the Community Economies Collective. 1

The Double Binds of Getting Food among the Poor in Rural Oregon

Abstract An in-depth ethnographic study of low-income rural residents in Oregon shows that they are caught in double binds as their ways of life and their incomes increasingly do not fit with the neoliberal economic order, creating tensions in the ways in which they can fulfill their food needs. The study uses Bourdieus definition of a double bind as a set of inculcated habits that do not match the changing field in social, economic and political ways, and thus people are not able to live effectively. In this study, we found that interviewees, many of whom have experienced economic and social decline in their lives, exhibit attempts to keep up and strategies particular to their situation that do not fit easily into the neoliberal economy. Analysis of the data shows several important double binds: eating habits that do not fit their nutritional knowledge or their food income; strategizing for material cultural capital on incomes that can ill afford it; use of social networks to survive; and contradictory perceptions of independence set against need for government assistance.

The Politics of Unofficial Language Use Walloon in Belgium, Tamazight in Morocco

The state under capitalism, according to Poulantzas, establishes the frontiers of the nation, thereby creating national territory which is then ’lived’ as natural. In the process the state also unifies and homogenizes the nation which is now inside its frontiers, thus creating a nation which is homologous with its state. The state accomplishes this in part by monopolizing national traditions while suppressing the ’traditions, histories and memories of dominated nations’ (Poulantzas, 1980: 113) now within the territory. In other words, ’the State establishes the modern nation by eliminating other national pasts and turning them into variations of its own history’ (Poulantzas, 1980: 113). It thus historicizes a territory and territorializes a history, and, in the process, creates a unified, homogenized nation by eradicating difference. A major tool of this homogenization process is the imposition of a standardized language disseminated through the public school system. Bourdieu points to the educational system as particularly important since it has a monopoly over the production of the mass of producers and consumers and therefore ’over the reproduction of the market on which

Constructing a Community Food Economy

This article addresses paradigm shifts in the U.S. food system and the problems that commodity food poses for local food movements. Balancing the availability of low-cost food for everyone and living wages for local farmers and farm workers presents a major challenge to successfully shifting from a productionist to an ecologically integrated agrifood paradigm. Local food movements juxtapose a knowledge-rich food environment to the one imposed by the productionist paradigm of industrial agriculture in which the origins of food products and the methods of their production are hidden from the consumer. “Commodity foods,” then, represent the anonymity and the hypercommodification that characterizes the global food system. This article examines the struggle to vertically integrate the local food system in Oregons Willamette Valley. 1

Teaching about Globalization and Food in Ecuador

Abstract This article describes a course we taught while on exchange at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito during the spring semester of 2006. Food studies provided a window through which to explore issues of race and class and the effects of globalization in this Andean country. The timing was also perfect in that Ecuador was being pressured by the United States into quickly signing a bilateral free-trade agreement. Popular pressure derailed the talks soon after our class was over. Protests by indigenous farmers, in fact, were happening at the same time as the class reached its apogee in the form of a field trip to the indigenous market of Zumbagua to restudy the work done there twenty years earlier by Mary Weismantel, recorded in her important book, Food, Gender and Poverty in the Ecuadorian Andes.

Popular Culture as Contested Terrain: The Case of Tchantchès@@@Popular Culture as Contested Terrain: The Case of Tchantches

Tchantches, a lusty character quick to stand up for the rights of the downtrodden, is a popular hero introduced to Liege by 19th-century working-class puppeteers. Gradually, however, he has been detached from his working-class roots and abstracted into a generalized symbol of regional identity. Using theoretical works on the ideology of nationalism, the A. explores the historical development of this symbol and the ideological forces that have vied and continue to vie for his image. Evidence is drawn from literature and from an analysis of puppet performances in the 1980s.

The Future of Sustainability as a Product of the Present: Lessons from Modern Food in Ecuador

Drawing on historical research in the northern highlands of Ecuador, the authors summarize how 75 years of state-supported agricultural modernization and subsequent food policies have led to diverse, wide-scale socio-environmental decline. Despite this global trend, they find considerable heterogeneity in familylevel farming and food practices, with highly diverse and important implications for human health, economy and the environment. Following a study of ‘positive deviance’, they argue that certain production-consumption patterns are more sustainable than others, representing a time-proven, yet largely neglected resource for policy reform. Nevertheless, Ecuador’s investment in modern food poses formidable institutional challenges to change, while sparking increasingly influential social counter-movements.

Regionalist accents of global music: the Occitan rap of Les Fabulous Trobadors1

Popular music has been an important source of language for youth subcultures for most of the twentieth century, especially when disseminated by the recording industry. Generally speaking, youth subcultures focus on what they perceive to be new and urban. Regional minority languages, more typically associated with what is old and rural, have been excluded from the process of mediatization until recently. This article examines the 1990s phenomenon of Occitan rap and raggamuffin groups and their self-conscious promotion of minority languages through the media. We focus in particular on the music of Les Fabulous Trobadors who claim to link those who say ’6c’ for ’oui’ and those who say ’yo’ for ’yes,’ and use transnational contemporary musical forms to emphasize the horizontal ties of non-dominant cultures. First, we look at forms of transmission of this group’s music, and then turn to how this group has reinterpreted certain historical imagery. Of special interest is its nostalgia for a hybrid medieval world sheltered from national centralization. We look at the privileging of the local along with the acknowledgement of global influences, paying particular attention to language use and levels of understanding. The Fabulous Trobadors, composed of Ange B and Claude Sicre, first came on the French popular music scene in 1992 with the recording ’Era pas de faire.’ Ange B (Jean-Marc Enjalbert, known as the ’Human Juke Box’) came