First, let me say that I am a first-rate flake – lots of enthusiasm and promises but not a lot of action following them, until Ian sent me THREE 'nudgingly reminding' emails. Locational schitzophrenia has been at fault in the last month or so, but now I am firmly seated again in Kansas. But upon reading the posts in the blog, I think this late-coming gives me an advantage as well, of being able to build upon what previous posters have already written.
I am especially interested in the comments and stories related by Jean Duruz in her blog post, particularly the discussion referring to Ian's usage of hooks' 'eating the other'. Drawing on Hage, Nayaran and Ang, Duruz raises the possibility of a cultural exchange that is not centered on white privilege and positionality, but that also uses the guilt that accompanies it as an instrument for understanding and interaction. What I want to contribute is not so much a discussion of the theory behind that, but some experiences in my own research that raise even more questions about issues of spaces of exchange and the moral economy of those spaces. I am especially interested in constructed spaces of mixing and the intersections between foods mixing and social movements centered on food itself, such as the fair trade movement. As other bloggers have already done, I want to briefly address food geographies especially in relation to their moral economies, but also my own role in creating those geographies.
Can intentionally constructed spaces of exchange and interaction around food and consumables effectively defetishize the thing and illuminate social relations? This question has preoccupied me since even before I entered graduate school, when I coordinated a fair trade agrotourism project in Nicaragua. The agrotourism project itself was designed and developed by a coffee cooperative to create a defined space for tourists, which often included church or student brigades and others specifically interested in the 'reality' of fair trade coffee, to explore 'fair trade on the ground'. They would visit rural coffee growing communities, staying the night in farming families' homes, working with them on the farm, etc. The home and the farm became not just a home and a farm, but a space of exchange, the medium of the message, which was that fair trade was a way to create direct links between consumers and producers. The problem that I saw emerging, especially after I started my MA program and began reading food geography literature, is that the very intentionality of the space defeats the purpose of making it a space of exchange: the farmers and their families learn over time what the visitors ('consumers') want to hear and repeat those messages, and the visitors return home not with a more complex understanding of fair trade, but with their previously-held views affirmed in regards to fair trade and the path their coffee takes (see Putnam 2007, 2008)..
This reaffirms questions already discussed in this blog about who is placed at the center of spaces of mixing (the white person or the other?) and who controls these spaces – even when it is ostensibly a space of production, rather than a space of consumption such as a restaurant? The farmers and cooperatives in the project have become more aware of their places and roles in the fair trade social movement as a result of their interaction with consumers/tourists/visitors; but those positions have not markedly changed as a result of those interactions. The farmers are still subject not only to market demand for their coffee (albeit certified market), but also to consumers' needs for the 'truth' of fair trade to exist in a way that fits their own experiences. They need to know that they are making a difference. The cooperative catering to that need within the consumer's own contextual framework ensures that the consumer continues to buy fair trade coffee (as my research has shown), but limits the mutual learning and knowing of the complexity of the relationship between the consumer and the producer. The point is that we can follow and we can mix, but even these methods can be limited by the political and moral economies of the relationships surrounding the 'things' we are involving ourselves with. It is exactly those moral economies of food and following that make it interesting.
I take a quote from Dixon and Jones (2004) referring to Gibson-Graham, that ‘the field site can become an encounter…in which one can experience creation rather than mere recognition via the testing or correction of theory’ (386). I have found myself in a position as an organizer and activist within a national student fair trade organization in the last few years. This position has been one in which I have power and resources to reflect not only individually and collectively with others on the political economy of fair trade coffee networks, but also to recreate them in ways that self-consciously attempt to rectify some of the understandings that we collectively have as a result of white guilt and neocolonial dynamics. I have been able to participate in creating spaces of discussion and collaboration at international conferences, at meetings between organizations, and by coordinating long-term exchanges in both directions between north and south, all the while talking to all participants—men and women producers and cooperative leaders, youth leaders and students, importers and coffee business people, NGO workers, certifiers, baristas, coffee drinkers, and others—about their experiences and views in relation to fair trade, coffee and the people surrounding those things. This is what my PhD is about, and it has been a journey of negotiating a commitment to ‘follow’ the social relations of three different places of coffee production with the constant self-questioning of how my choices are determined by my position as a researcher-activist, while also wondering how this research can contribute to everyone getting to know each other so that they all benefit. So far I am impressed by the extent to which inequities within coffee networks are related to people not knowing the experiences of other people; I am thinking that following the thing, and talking about the moral economies of ‘mixing’ cultures through food puts the researcher in an incredible position of power to create spaces of interaction. It is the potential of these intentional spaces of mixing that I would like to explore.
No comments:
Post a Comment