Update!
This week, I centralized the themes of text more than I did the previous week. It’s the last week that I am planning on thinking about the underlying structures and organization of movements. While in the upcoming weeks, I’ll still be reading literature about these issues, I am also thinking about more timely and critical matters that are related to the current federal administration.
The three most interesting/enlightening/challenging resources I used this week are all vastly different from one another. The three that I am choosing to talk about in this post are not necessarily the resources that were the most helpful at answering my learning objective questions, but they are the ones that I am continuing to think about, which seems to me to be just as important.
Cultural Modeling in Two Eras of Food Protest: Grahamites (1830s) and Organic Advocates (1960s-70s), Jeffery Haydu
I found this article incredibly frustrating. The main thesis that was presented compared the Grahamites to the Organic Advocates of the 1960s. Haydu uses the term “social movement” to describe both of these groups in their respective historical and political climate. I suppose that Haydu is not incorrect to label them as such, however I felt that he left out important details about the motivations of the Grahamites group. Early on in the text, Haydu refers to the Grahamite diet as the consumption of minimally processed foods to reconcile “social, spiritual, and physical corruption,” there is never any mention of the nationalist or religious extremist ideology that started the movement. Haydu continues on to say that the case of the Grahamites shows us that our inquiry to the safety and quality of our food is a long-term trend, leading to the argument for the similarity between early organic advocates and the Grahamites and dismissing the underlying differences between the two movements.
Possibly the reason I feel uneasy about the legitimacy of this text is because I kept on waiting for the author to make the one claim that we all already know to be historically accurate. Evangelical Sylvester Graham began his movement with the intention of persuading people not to masturbate. Just as relevant, the foods Graham was deeming as exceptional were domestic products such as grain (for bread, not beer) and the sinful foods were imported items such as spices that were both exotic and lustful. I don’t believe that one can accurately support the argument that the Grahamites started something that later inspired Organic Advocates.
While social movements strategies such as lunch counter sit-ins or the crossing of feminist ideologies are often used repeatedly from past movements’ success, the context that these two specific movements fall into are too different to claim that one influence the other. For starters, organic advocates, both in the 60s and 70s as well as today, are defensive mobilizers. The overlapping message of their issue is that they are fighting against types of industrial agriculture to uphold health of person and land. Food movements today are based in prefigurative politics that see a world where organic agriculture is the norm and biodiversity is a valued standard. However, they are also fighting against corporate lobbyists and monopoly producers that continue to buy our organic farmers. On the other hand, we have seen that the Grahamites platform was only prefigurative. Sylvester Graham’s crusade of non-masturbators stood to convince other people to join their eating agenda but did not have any larger powers that were against their movement, unlike organic advocates.
Another Politics, Taking Across Today’s Transformative Movements, Chris Dixon
This book is dense and often repeats itself, but so far it has been the most helpful book I have read regarding organization and strategizing. Also, it’s written by an Evergreen graduate, which I did not realize until I was a about a quarter of the way through it. The layout of the book first introduces the reader to the history of larger movements of the 20th and 21st century, then, using this information discusses the politics of social movements and the anti-authoritarian ideology that many activists as well as introduces the idea of pre-figurative politics versus knowing what a movement is ‘against.’ The last two sections of the book are focused on developing strategy in a world that does not yet accept a movement’s vision as well as the leadership/organizer role that many movements develop.
At the end of this week, I was preparing to start writing my research paper that I am still aiming to complete by Week 7. After finishing this book, I finally felt able to start writing parts of the final paper. I ended up citing this book quite a few times, and while I’m not going to write any personal incites or analyses about my time reading it now, I did have a couple of favorite quotes that I can share instead:
Rojas-Urrutias says of social movements in Latin America, “the struggle is on the people’s struggle for autonomy, not gathering power to take over the state and topple it. Revolution is about the process of making power creating autonomous communities that divest from the state” (105)
“There are in fact a few kinds of activity that tend to get lumped together under the label “prefigurative.” Perhaps the most widely recognized of these forms is to practice countercultural lifestyles that in some way point toward a better society. Whether vegetarianism, collective living, or nonmonogamous relationships, such lifestyles generally involve efforts to “live our values”—to bring day-to-day ways of living into line with radical aspirations” (131).
“As organizers, we struggle with the often harmful ways we have been socialized to treat one another and with how to develop more healthy and liberating practices. And if we’re succeeding, we’re grappling with these things inside movements that are fighting against injustice. We face important questions about how to combine our attempts to develop new social relations with our efforts to challenge existing social relations…work around healing is a powerful basis for developing consciousness and taking action against structural forms of violence” (142).
The Poetry of Creatures, On Being podcast with Ellen Davis and Wendell Berry, hosted by Krista Tippett
Overall, I’m a huge fan of this podcast series. It’s been in production for over a decade and I’m always finding old shows that I’ve never listened to before. Each show is based in theology, which I’m sure may be a turn off for some people, however I personally find theology rather captivating and the guests that Tippett interviews are diverse in terms of both identity and profession.
In this podcast, Tippett interviews Ellen Davis, an environmentalist and biblical scholar and uses recordings of Wendell Berry reading some of his poetry about agriculture. At one point, Davis talks about one of her students telling her she needed to ask a question about land on a test she was writing. Davis was caught off guard; she had not realized how often she spoke about the necessary relationship that humans have with the land. Davis continues to say that there was no need to search for mentions of land and sea within the bible because it seemed to appear in everything. From a literary perspective, I personally return to thinking back to the importance of kitchens as a space in the house. In some ways, the mention of land is the same way. They are both grounding, and reconnecting to memory, life, and hearth.
Consciousness is crucial to the relationship that we hold with land and garden. Davis mentions this when she speaks about the times she was unaware she was lecturing about land. She relates the same thought to the practices and traditions in how we eat and remembering that our land is our food and vice versa. When we’ve made these connections, the next step is asking questions about the morals that are tied to our food and what it means to eat the food we choose to eat.
Certainly, this podcast is tied directly around the subject of land and conservation efforts that will lead to change while also abstaining from romanticizing farming or the work of the land. In one of his poems in the podcast, Berry says, “When hope sets out on its desperate search for reasons, it can find them.” In some search for clarity, Davis responds by saying, “The is a difference between hope and foolish optimism. And in order to have hope, you have to see the depth and dimensions of the problem.”