Culture Agriculture Food and Environment最新文献

As we go to print with this issue at the end of October 2020, the November 3rd presidential election and the indeterminate end of the COVID-19 pandemic weigh heavily on our minds. The results of this election and decisions about how to deal with the economic crisis triggered by the pandemic will affect us all for years to come. In a moment when essential workers are honored as heroes, perhaps the most essential workers in our labor system—immigrant workers who cultivate, pick, and pack food—are made more vulnerable by policies and rhetoric designed to dehumanize them. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the U.S. Justice Department recently announced that the parents of 545 migrant children who were separated from family members by officials at the U.S. border between 2017 and 2018 cannot be found. We would like to think that a change in administration in the White House could result in a dramatically different approach to immigration policy in the United States, but this result is not guaranteed. Consistent and relentless pressure for reform will always be necessary.

The articles in this special issue reflect the central role played by anthropologists and social theorists in bringing to light the issues facing immigrants, especially farmworkers, during (before, and likely, after) the Trump era. In her introduction, guest editor Teresa M. Mares pulls together the central threads that run through these articles—the forms of fear, isolation, and oppression exacerbated under Trump but also the work of various actors involved in caring for those made more vulnerable in this moment and actively resisting immigration enforcement tactics. We hope that the insights provided in this special issue collection will inform the creation of better policies that honor the critical importance of immigrants in our labor system and our communities.

Also in this issue, Nicole Peterson and Andrea Freidus investigate in detail what food security looks and feels like for American university students in More than Money: Barriers to Food Security on a College Campus. Drawing on collaborative fieldwork involving undergraduate research assistants and food bank staff, Peterson and Freidus explore the many barriers that make it difficult for students to secure adequate amounts and types of food. They argue that conventional analyses of food security often overlook these non-financial barriers, which include time, transportation, and other factors described by the students participating in the study. Together with the articles in this special issue, this contribution reminds us of the many forms of precarity within the U.S. food system.

Latina farmworkers in rural Idaho live with geographic isolation, fear of deportation, gender disparities, and income inequalities. While economic and social challenges have existed for decades, fear and isolation have become more acute during the Trump administration. Utilizing interview, survey, and focus group data, we identify multiple ways in which Latina farmworkers struggle with policy-exacerbated isolation. We find that experiences of isolation intersect with gender disparities and economic inequalities, and this ultimately affects women’s well-being.

The political health ecology of Vermont is shaped by its status as a rural, borderland state and its dependence upon dairy for agricultural revenue in a fluctuating neoliberal market. The Care Center, a free clinic serving uninsured patients in Cherry County, is the primary medical provider for the growing Latinx migrant worker population that supports the majority of Vermont dairy farms. My findings demonstrate the gendered nature of how Latinx migrant dairy workers and healthcare professionals navigate the compounding precarities in Vermont that make safety and wellness difficult to establish. I contend that the layered use of structural vulnerability, political health ecology, and ecofeminist situated sustainability offers a perspective on the hidden interconnectedness between healthcare work and sustainability, ultimately providing directions for collaboration.

The Trump administration’s policies have created a climate of heightened hostility in the U.S. northern borderlands that exacerbates im/migrant farmworkers’ anxieties surrounding deportation and family separation. At the same time, Trump’s enforcement initiatives have inspired resistance efforts aimed at mitigating these threats. Drawing on evidence from ethnographic research with Mexican and Guatemalan farmworkers in New York, we explore these interrelated, countervalent trends. First, we show how farmworkers’ heightened fears and social isolation since the outset of Trump’s presidency negatively impact their emotional and mental health. Second, we trace an opposing force of state-level political shifts and local activities that may be mitigating these detrimental effects for im/migrant farmworkers. In particular, we focus on pro-immigrant advocacy efforts in New York. We refer to this pro-immigrant turn as contramigra, a phenomenon of intentional pushback against immigration detention and polimigra cooperation tactics between nonfederal law enforcement and federal immigration authorities.

Gender is a key lens through which to understand industrial agricultural production in rural twenty-first century communities. Here, I examine the gendered imaginaries of dairy production that perpetuate the meaning of “farmer” as masculine and white. The expertise of Mexican immigrant workers, and particularly that of women on spousal visas, challenges such assumptions and highlights the role of unremunerated labor in sustaining the industrial food chain. Everyday experiences of gender and race are shaped not only by local-level assumptions but also by federal-level immigration policies and employer recruitment practices that result in a mostly male immigrant agricultural workforce. In this article, I draw on interviews with rural Minnesota community members, as well as local and regional news coverage, to examine how gender and race intersect to marginalize the work and expertise of Mexican immigrants in the rural Midwest. In this case, Mexican immigrant mothers frame their labor as part of a complex calculus of immigration benefits and sacrifices.

Immigrants—especially those from farmworker or campesino backgrounds—have gained attention as promising recruits for a new generation of sustainable farmers. Nonprofits promoting this aspirational vision of food justice link sustainability to empowered workers and communities of color, and to the preservation or revival of (agri)cultural traditions. I present findings from ongoing research showing that Oregon nonprofit food sovereignty initiatives training Mexican immigrant farmers have achieved successes as cultural, community building, and educational programs, but have struggled to produce viable farm businesses. I contrast these farmers with the less ecologically oriented and less self-consciously “cultural” immigrant farmers who work without organizational support in the same region, and who find an aspirational agrarian good life in more conventional agricultural practices. I argue that activist and academic formulations of food sovereignty linking peasant heritage, sustainability, labor rights, and immigration justice may lead scholars to overstate immigrant farmers' actual propensity for "alternative" agriculture and ignore those immigrant farmers who fail to conform to this ideal.

Studies have shown that many college students are experiencing food insecurity and that the reasons for this are multifactorial. Students are unable to acquire adequate food to meet their needs because of limited money, time, transportation, and other factors. However, food insecurity rates are almost always assessed by using the USDA’s food security survey module, which frames the barriers to food access as purely financial by relying entirely on items that explicitly ask about a financial barrier to food security, rather than any other possible barriers. Using survey and interview data collected in collaboration with our campus food pantry and undergraduate student researchers from 2015 to 2019, we show that student food insecurity is a result of complex factors that go beyond financial limitations. We argue that the USDA measure is insufficient for fully assessing the prevalence of college student food insecurity because it presupposes a financial cause for food insecurity and then undercounts those who are food insecure for other reasons.

Post-civil war, African Americans developed communities in Georgia where traditional fishing practices created family fleets, processing plants, and other self-sustaining fisheries work. The decline in African American fishermen since that period has been attributed to increased fishing costs, little access to capital, and a reluctance to have children work in labor-intensive fisheries professions (Blount, MAST (Maritime Studies), 5, 2007, 5). Additionally, fluctuations in commercial landings may have had a negative influence. This study tested these hypotheses by comparing first-hand accounts from current and former African American fishermen and their families with trends in Georgia fisheries data (1950–2015). Analyses of the histories and landings data indicated that African Americans fished the most abundant species during the years described by the participants (1950–1985) and that reasons for fishing or not fishing could be classified into 8 major themes related to work experience, Gullah Geechee values, and generational shifts.

At the time we are writing this, the world is focused on fighting an unprecedented global pandemic following the spread of COVID-19. Many have been advised to work from home, and “social distancing” policies prohibit face-to-face interactions or social gatherings of more than ten. The articles in this issue reflect the creative and collaborative ways that anthropologists, including archaeologists, study how people experience and adapt to rapid or gradual ecological and social change in specific community contexts. As we grapple personally and intellectually with how to navigate the connections and disconnections created by COVID-19, these articles remind us of the many analytical tools that we have for researching processes of crisis, disruption, and renewal. The authors help us understand how communities process, grieve, remember, and work collaboratively toward renewal after experiencing different types of loss of environmental quality, livelihood, access to familiar foods, and mobility across borders. They remind us to take time to understand the deeply emotional, as well as the political and economic, processes at work in times of crisis and inspire us to continue working together (despite social distancing) to document the ways that communities navigate disruption.

In Farming the Great Sage Plain: Experimental Agroarchaeology and the Basketmaker III Soil Record, Cynthia M. Fadem and Shanna R. Diederichs draw on the results of two research projects undertaken by the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center to investigate patterns of soil development in the semiarid Mesa Verde region. This research allows them to explore the effects of dryland agricultural practices used by Ancestral Pueblo peoples on pedogenesis (the process of soil formation) and soil fertility. These findings are important for understanding Ancestral Pueblo farming practices and lifeways and for mitigating the effects of climate change and desertification in this region today. Fadem and Diederichs also demonstrate the value of collaborative research in archaeology; at Crow Canyon, archaeologists work alongside members of the Hopi tribe as they experiment with traditional farming techniques.

Suzanne Kent and Keri Vacanti Brondo explore the importance of documenting how communities identify and ritualize emotional experiences of environmental loss in “Years Ago the Crabs Was so Plenty”: Anthropology's Role in Ecological Grieving and Conservation Work. They tease out the many ways that ecological grieving is central to our experiences in the Anthropocene and how it can create spaces for hope and regeneration. Working collaboratively with conservationists based in Honduras, Kent and Brondo conducted interviews with people living on the island of Utila. They examine these particular narratives of ecological loss and call on anthropologists to pay closer attention to the emotional dynamics of environmental change.

Consumption, especially of food