Stationary

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, a revolution in production has been virtually completed. The countryside is depopulated. Agricultural labor has been almost completely replaced with mechanical, chemical, biological, and information technologies. The few commercial farmers left provide few of their daily household or enterprise needs from their own production. Firms offering specialized supplies and services sell the resources that were once part of a farmers’ necessary stock of knowledge and skill.

North American farms have always been part of the larger national and world economies, but at the beginning of the twenty-first century, their role as primary producers has been vastly overshadowed by other elements in the agriculture-food system (Magdoff, Foster, and Buttel 2000). In the process, small towns that once served as seats of government, market centers, and manufactories for their rural hinterlands have lost their reason for existence. Those in the orbits of urban regions have become bedroom communities. Those that do not lie within easy reach of cities are withering and dying, populated largely by retirees and the people who care for them. 1

This transformation flags a sharp shift in the issues facing rural America. While farmers continue to face volatile and unpredictable weather, marketing, and labor conditions, the attention of the nation, and of some farmers, has shifted to the environment and to community “quality of life.” The environmental movement of the mid-twentieth century signaled this shift. It framed apocalyptic visions of a future laid waste by overpopulation and pollution. It has been the leading foe of the application of genetic engineering to agriculture, and among the strongest critics of the “green revolution” and its biotechnologies. At its more radical edges, but with broad sympathy from large portions of the population, it began creating visions of human-nature interrelations far different from scientific and technical models of knowledge and control. As many of the articles in this volume document, “green” politics have become an increasingly important aspect of debates regarding farming and farm policy.

Throughout most of the twentieth century, agricultural and rural policy debates have been framed in technical and economic terms. Only rarely have social relationships been highlighted. And, aside from an enduring concern with conservation, the destructive consequences of radically simplifying the ecology were unforeseen. As Ferguson (1990) observed, mid-twentieth century theories of development assumed that all social problems would yield to expert-driven technical solutions. 2 For much of the century, most rural people seemed to agree that expert advice not only promised but provided unprecedented prosperity and comfort, and they accepted the downsides of declining populations and emigrating children as a necessary consequence. Governmental policies and private initiatives created enormous material abundance, signaled by the year-round availability of inexpensive fresh and processed foods in every North American supermarket. Except for a few dissenting voices, the direction of the post-War food system received virtually unquestioned support. That is no longer the case.

At the end of the century, as several of the essays in this book demonstrate, those policy decisions have led to the threat of both ecological and social death. They have eliminated most farmers, emptied out the countryside, and created production systems predicated on chemicals that contaminate surface waters, drain ancient aquifers, and often poison the farmers themselves. My own work has traced this transformation (Adams 1994a). Nostalgia and regret are not attitudes becoming of a scholar, but one cannot look at the current conditions of rural America without feeling that, as Kathryn Dudley says in this volume, “something has gone terribly wrong.” And, as immigrants from Mexico, other Latin American countries, and other regions of the Third World pour into the United States and other industrial nations, it is obvious that the current wave of capitalist development, termed “globalization,” is restructuring the peasant agricultures that have remained in the rest of the world.

Understanding the political dynamics that brought us to this current state is, therefore, not an idle exercise. But, curiously, while social scientists have devoted considerable energies to developing and critiquing specific policies for agriculture and for rural communities, very little scholarship has analyzed the political process itself. Of that scholarship, most analyze the state. Far less attention has been paid to the ways that people become agents, interest groups form up, issues become framed and debated, and alternatives constructed. These questions assume that the governance of society is a process of continual invention by human actors, rather than the rehearsal of an inherited script or one written by larger social forces. Sometimes, as the articles in this collection demonstrate, people do appear to act in service to some external playwright. More often, however, they tap into their received knowledge and desires to create unforeseen alternatives. A focus on political dynamics forces the analyst to come face to face with uncertainty, indeterminacy, and invention.

The aim of this volume is to collect together scholars from several disciplines to bring their specific disciplinary and theoretical perspectives to bear on political processes within North American agriculture. 3 It is impossible, of course, within a single collection, to represent all relevant theoretical and topical issues. This volume does, however, provide the student of North American agriculture with a window into how, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, scholars are attempting to comprehend the play of power and the political process in North American agriculture.

This collection begins with an overview of the development of North American agriculture, using two specific regions as case studies based in somewhat contrasting theoretical approaches. Rudy bases his analysis of the Imperial Valley on O’Connor’s work on the fiscal crisis of the state and the environmental crisis; Knuttila places the development of western Canadian prairie agriculture in the context of the world system and Canada’s place within it. Constance, Kleiner, and Rikoon take up five theories of the state in the era of globalization and test their applicability to a specific political battle, over large-scale hog production in Missouri. Miriam Wells then analyzes the formation of specific interest groups in the ethnically stratified strawberry fields of California, within a shifting legal and political arena.

The second section takes up some of the historical roots of U.S. agricultural policies, with Shulman’s analysis of the agenda setting debates around the first farm credit legislation and Gilbert’s and Summer’s rethinking of the New Deal. These readings not only recast our understandings of the agricultural New Deal, but demonstrate the contingent and contested outcomes of one of the major policy arenas of twentieth century farm policy. Barnett then presents a particularly lucid and complex account of the causes of the farm crisis of the 1980s, arguing that the intellectual and ideological framework within which agricultural economists operated made them unable to accurately analyze the crisis as it occurred.

Barnett’s article forms a bridge to the third section, “The political implications of daily life.” Dudley and DeLind turn from politics as direct engagement with state institutions to the “micropolitics,” or cultural context, within which political action occurs or does not occur. Dudley’s provocative ethnography of a Minnesota farming community’s response to the 1980s farm crisis captures the paradoxical nature of these farmers’ moral commitments in communities that “reproduce the logic of market capitalism.” DeLind addresses, as well, the problem of creating viable communities. She demonstrates the power of a vision of an alternative food system and social order and the pressures exerted on this vision by the daily practices required to operate within a capitalist order.

While both Dudley and DeLind focus on the practices of daily life that create or undermine durable communities, the final section examines the discursive arena, where meanings are publicly deployed and contested. Hall shows how, in the play of Canadian political processes, the trope of “sustainability” has become stretched to the limits of its meaning, even as its practical usage remains contested. Reisner applies formal discourse analysis to understand the ways that various groups in motion draw upon discursive resources and deploy them in political struggle. Her article demonstrates, as Constance, Kleiner, and Rikoon and Wells have already indicated, that, on occasion, social movements can create compelling formulations that allow them to prevail in the political arena, even when opposed by powerful, heavily financed, interests.

Friedmann’s article, with its utopian vision supported by a deep analysis of contemporary global political economy and by an attempt to shift paradigmatic assumptions through alternative tropology, completes the volume.

The remainder of this Introduction orients the reader to the major debates and issues relevant to the topics taken up in each section.

This section contains four articles. The first two sketch more than a century of development, from European settlement in the case of Canada and from American settlement in the case of the Imperial Valley of California. The second two analyze specific political struggles over concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) in Missouri and the organization of strawberry production in California. All these studies focus on the role of the state in relation to localities, drawing on different, albeit not necessarily contradictory, theories to understand the processes the authors try to understand. These articles lay out many of the key theoretical and analytical issues facing the analysis of North American agriculture. These include problematics of historical periodization, the nature of the modern democratic state in a capitalist economy, the salience of classes and other significant social groupings, and the significance of territoriality. They begin to address the contingent nature of “actors,” understood as the identities claimed by and attributed to people who appear within the play of power in public arenas.

With the historical turn in the social sciences, the question of periodization, central to historiography but little attended to by functionalist analyses, becomes important. Rudy and Knuttila orient us to the development of farming in western North America. Striking in their accounts is the brief span of time that has elapsed since the opening of the western lands to American and Canadian agriculture. Equally striking is the displacement of agriculture from the center of these regions’ economies. Barely a century after their opening, potentially irreversible ecological and social degradation, respectively, of the two regions threatens their continued social viability.

Rudy’s and Knuttila’s accounts indicate that the development of both regions was intimately linked to larger national and global development projects. Canada formed as a nation in the 1860s, establishing the west as a “new frontier of investment” by the “various fractions of capital,” ushering in the period he diagnoses as the beginning of the corporate phase of capitalist accumulation. This coincided with the consolidation of U.S. control over its western territories following the Civil War.

In both western Canada and the Imperial Valley settlers did not firmly establish themselves until the early years of the twentieth century. The processes of industrial development in North America and Europe drove demand for agricultural products, stimulating the development of new technologies and marketing systems and displacing European populations. Both states strongly supported the development of a class of landowning agriculturists. This was a period of considerable instability and fluidity as nature was subdued, communities formed, labor supplies established, and governing institutions created. It was characterized by crises: in the case of the Imperial Valley, misplaced irrigation works that diverted the Colorado River into the Salton Sink, creating the Salton Sea; in western Canada, crises attendant on marketing of wheat. In each case, the federal governments moved aggressively to resolve the crises in order to preserve the landowning farmers its policies had created.

Knuttila locates the beginning of the next period with the Great Depression; Rudy with World War II. These periodizations are based, in part, on differences in the two regions and countries: Knuttila sees the Depression as the end of a period of expansion and the beginning of a period of sustained crisis and instability, contextualized by Canada’s location in the continental economy and the establishment of Keynesian principles in state regulation of the economy. Rudy focuses on the institutional stability established by the New Deal with the completion of irrigation works and the federal government’s post-WWII commitment to providing Mexican migrant agricultural labor through the bracero program. Western Canada’s reliance on wheat, in contrast to the diversified agricultural products of the Imperial Valley, must also be considered as a factor in their differences, as the crises and population declines afflicting Saskatchewan also afflicted the other grain (and cotton) producing regions of the United States. Some of the issues raised here will be more fully addressed in Section II, The Foundations of Twentieth Century U.S. Farm Policy.

Both place the beginning of the next period in the 1970s, with the neo-liberal economic policies often referred to as “globalization.” The 1970s, as Wells says, marks a “global economic watershed.” In the wheat growing regions of Canada, state-led institutions that attempted to regularize and support wheat production and marketing were dismantled; in the Imperial Valley, globalization undermined established labor relations. More significant in California, the ecological limits of irrigation agriculture began to threaten the continued viability of many crops with increasingly severe pest outbreaks and degradation of the general environment.

Ironically, the cases studied by Constance, Kleiner, and Rikoon in Missouri, and Wells in California, locate the 1970s as a period when popular, “subordinate” groups were successful in obtaining government regulations. In Missouri, independent farmers won exclusion of absentee corporate operations; in California, farm workers unionized and gained protections long available to other workers. These gains were, however, short-lived, as the forces unleashed by globalization reworked the terrain.

The state is an obvious focus for those concerned with political processes and the play of power. Within their territorial reach, state institutions, with their monopoly of legitimate force, are arguably the most powerful single entity. They are, almost by definition, political in their constitution and processes--concerned with the ordering of power relations and the attendant resources within their domains. Their forms of authority and modes of financial support derive from non-market mechanisms of accumulation; the modern nation state has, in addition, enormous capacity to regulate and direct other sectors of society. The articles in this section and Shulman’s article on the formation of the Farm Credit system, in particular, in section 2, document the growing capacity of the U.S. and Canadian states to affect the course of agricultural development.

The nature and role of the state has been a subject of sustained debate in western social, political, and moral theory. All of the articles in this volume, insofar as they theorize the state, draw their primary influences from Marx and Weber. They are all historical, locating their analyses within a logic formed by prior actions, what Shulman, following Scokpol, terms “path dependent.” They are, as well, structural, concerned with defining the key societal forces, metaphorically understood as structures, within which individuals and groups act.

The articles in the first section draw, more or less explicitly, on a tradition that problematizes the relationship between state and civil society. 4 They vary somewhat in how they understand this relationship, and in their analyses of salient social groups: Knuttila, writing about the development of western Canada, views the state as providing services to or acting as the agent of capital accumulation. The Canadian state he describes appears much like the “executive branch of the capitalist class” theorized in some of Marx and Engel’s and Lenin’s writings. Rudy, in contrast, understands the state as semi-autonomous, being both the agent and the product of rural and agricultural development. Drawing on O’Connor’s (1973, 1988, 1998) work, he views liberal democracies as forced to resolve often conflicting and sometimes contradictory demands in order to maintain their own apparatus and operations: they must create the conditions in which the (capitalist) economy can function smoothly and promote capital accumulation, and at the same time they must legitimate the social and ecological consequences of accumulation.

Constance, Kleiner, and Rikoon’s analysis of the political battles regarding corporately owned, large-scale hog operations views governing bodies in much the same way. They are a “contested terrain” in which government mediates class conflict derived from the needs of the state to promote economic development and, simultaneously, deal with the environmental, class, and community consequences of this development.

Throughout the twentieth century the governments of Canada and the United States have increased their capacity to effect their institutional goals. Not only have they increased overall capacity, in some quantitative sense, but their arenas of action have expanded and shifted. Knuttila focuses on the shift from promoting private infrastructure development through providing domestic and international legal structures and financial support (e.g., railroads, wheat pools) to actual administration of key aspects of the economy, as with the Canadian Wheat Board, and direct regulation of production, as with acreage allotments, crop insurance, and providing farm credit. In the Imperial Valley, as well, the U.S. and California governments shifted from providing primarily infrastructure support and land for settlement and irrigation works to creating and administering key dimensions of the economy.

Constance, Kleiner, and Rikoon directly address the issue of state capacity in their overview of theories of globalization. As they indicate, globalization appears to undermine state capacities to regulate and administer their domestic economies. Many of their prerogatives appear to be in the process of being supplanted by global bodies like the World Trade Organization (WTO), the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the International Standards Organization (ISO). 5 Constance, Kleiner, and Rikoon view the current conjuncture as a period of “deregulation” and “re-regulation,” with the nation state retaining crucial, but different, functions in the new world order that has not yet congealed.

States can be viewed as the primary entity that installs formal, codified order upon the rest of society. The creation, implementation, and enforcement of law is one of the key functions of centralized polities. Wells and Constance, Kleiner, and Rikoon focus on this aspect of the state. Wells reveals the way that legal regimes, created through the contest between farmworkers organized in unions and growers, shifted the nature of the relationship between grower and worker. In this new terrain, growers found it easier to assure a stable and responsible labor supply through shifting to sharecropping. This converted farm laborers into independent contractors. A changed legal identity, based on judicial rulings, shifted the contractors back once again to wage laborers.

The contract relationship has increasingly come to characterize the relationship between many agricultural producers and other entities in the food industry. Poultry, cattle, and hogs, in particular, are now raised by farmers as contractors for transnational agribusinesses. Constance, Kleiner, and Rikoon analyze the contests of popular and corporate interests over the establishment and regulation of concentrated hog operations. Governing bodies (local and state, more than national), they demonstrate, face strong limits to their regulatory capacity, since corporate interests not only have considerable power to obtain laws that override local control, but they also have the power simply to leave for less regulated territories should popular or other opposing forces prevail.

Constance, Kleiner, and Rikoon also indicate the shifting significance of territories. In Knuttila’s telling, in the nineteenth century western Canada appeared to eastern capitalists as a domain from which to extract resources, and that, as it became settled, would absorb investments and provide markets for their products. The Imperial Valley, although always dealing with the Mexican nation from which it was formed and which it abutted, began its settled history as a relatively insular region, articulating with the outside world largely through markets, investments, and agricultural labor, regulated by the federal and state governments. These territorial arrangements have shifted. No longer do states have solid control over financial flows; the regulation of labor, as Wells argues, has slipped out of the control of territorial entities; and as Constance, Kleiner, and Rikoon demonstrate, sites of production shift according to the regulatory and other “climates” imposed by governments. Insofar as states are defined by a territorial integrity, the new regimes of globalization undermine that integrity. Yet, as Arce, Long, and others stress (Arce and Long 2000, Harvey 1989), territories remain important sites of contestation.

All the articles in this section take class as a key analytical category. Class, as used in this volume, refers to social categories defined by relations of production. Economic relations have frequently been analyzed as key determinants of historical processes; however, all the analysts in this volume see economic relationships as important but not necessarily determinative aspects of political processes. 6

Class position, it is often argued, shapes individual and group interests. However, as Wells notes, in many instances people act contrary to putatively “objective” economic interests. People involved in agricultural production, in particular, seem to act in ways that do not further their individual or collective interests, nor to form solidarities primarily on the basis of class (Adams 1997). Mooney (1988), arguing that political consciousness arises from the economic base, diagnosed this as due to farmers’ contradictory class position as both capitalist and laborer.

Rudy specifically argues with this proposition. Drawing on O’Connor’s theorization of the environment, he argues that labor and capital are opposed not only because their “interests” differ, but because human labor cannot be reduced to a pure commodity; it remains a “fictive commodity”(Polanyi 1957) necessarily embedded in the lifeworlds of the human beings who work. Similarly, the communities within which people live and recreate themselves and the “natural” world cannot be reduced to, nor reproduced as, commodities. 7 Class, from this perspective, is a necessary but incomplete analytic tool.

Wells’ study challenges the premise that economic position determines individual interest. Her argument lies both with (some) Marxists and with neo-classical economists and others who draw on utilitarianism to posit objectively discernable interests. While giving considerable interpretive weight to class as a structural position individuals inhabit, she imaginatively stands in the experience of those she seeks to understand, viewing their lives as including their past and anticipated future and their kin and other significant relationships. She also begins to theorize other communal identities, specifically those created by shared language, values, and national origin.

Wells, as well as Constance, Kleiner, and Rikoon, also allude to an important dimension of what is being termed “globalization,” the decline in secure industrial employment and the proliferation of low-wage jobs that largely escape the regulatory view of the state. The processes involved in these transformations are complex; among other effects, undermining peasant farming where it has persisted. In the United States, the sharp rise in the number of Hispanics, and particularly Mexicans, counted in the 1990 and 2000 Census, signals this process.

Simultaneously, production processes become detached from specific locales. As Constance, Kleiner, and Rikoon document in the case of Continental Grain, major transnational corporations link together localized agricultural production systems. These transnational corporations perceive the world through a lens constrained to view the factors that gain them greatest profit and that pose a risk for economic loss. This optic leaves obscure many aspects of the world that people, communities, and ecologies require for their sustained reproduction, and in many cases undermines the communities in which they operate (Magdoff, Foster, and Buttel 2000, Heffernan 2000, Friedland et. al. 1991, also Friedmann this volume).

The great labor struggles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries created institutional forms through which both working people and the “captains of industry” became actors as members of social classes. The processes of globalization have fundamentally undermined these institutions, both as arenas for acting and as loci of social identities. In a manner similar to earlier forms of technological development that brought into being and then eliminated diverse kinds of labor, North American family farmers now seem to be on the cusp of virtual elimination, both as direct producers and as social actors.

State, territories, and classes are all conceptual categories as well as social “containers” for human action. They are, in the modern era, important arenas in which people contend. Whether or not land will be operated in chunks of tens or thousands of acres, who will own that land, what rights adhere to ownership, and who will work on it under what conditions have and will remain important politically. Whether people appear as independent contractors, as salaried employees, or as temporary workers sometimes is contested through direct negotiations, sometimes through organized agencies like labor unions or labor contractors, and sometimes through the creation and institutionalization of legal standards.

In the first two articles the highly contingent nature of the social orders that were created and repeatedly reconfigured does not come to the fore, necessarily submerged in narratives that summarize more than a century of settlement. The dynamics that occur are more visible in the account of how large scale hog operations became a flash point in Missouri agricultural politics, shifting rural people from acting primarily as “farmers” to acting as “rural residents,” concerned with odor and water quality at least as much as, if not more than, the viability of independent hog production. State entities like the Department of Natural Resources and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) take on regulatory powers once in the purview of the Department of Agriculture, if they existed at all. New organizations also arise, in this case the Family Farm Movement, born during the 1980s farm crisis as a coalition of family farmers and activists committed to environmentally and socially sustainable farming. New institutional, organizational, and individual actors have appeared upon the stage.

Wells takes this as her central problematic, carefully analyzing the ways that strawberry growers and Mexican laborers, with some degree of mutuality, despite their very different degrees of power, reconfigured their labor relationships as the legal environment shifted. “Identities” appear as contingent “positions” taken on by and/or attributed to people as they act in social arenas that they themselves participate in bringing into being.

The first set of articles sets the stage for issues that will recur repeatedly throughout the volume: history, state, territory, class, actors.

The four case studies in this section trace the history of twentieth century U.S. farm policy. Stuart Shulman analyzes the interests that framed the terms of debate over establishing a federal farm credit system in the first two decades of the century. Jess Gilbert examines efforts in the “Third New Deal” to establish agricultural planning based on grassroots education and participation. Dealing with the same crucial period, Mary Summers reads the demise of this effort at grassroots democracy through the actions of two significant players: Arthur Raper, a sociologist who studied and participated in the FSA planning efforts in Georgia, and Congressman Jamie Whitten, who steadfastly opposed them. Finally, Barry Barnett analyzes the 1980s farm crisis. These four studies open up the political arenas touched on by the historical studies of California’s Imperial Valley and Saskatchewan, Canada. They bracket the 80-year period during which North American agriculture became fully modern. The articles in this section, in addition to deepening the debates introduced in the first set of articles, bring to the fore the importance of public debate over policy and the centrality of specific actors in effecting policy.

By the early years of the twentieth century agriculture had become secondary to industrial production. Although farmers remained active politically, the great agrarian movements of the late nineteenth century had subsided. Many individuals and groups sought to modernize farming and see it operate with “sound business practices.” Farmers were, however, notoriously resistant to the forms of modernization that were promoted (Scott 1972, Scott 1998), at least those that would increase agricultural productivity (Danbom 1995:163-4, Cochrane 1993:110). They did, however, become consumers, seeking the conveniences and comforts created by the expanding industrial order (Danbom 1995, Blanke 2000, Owenby 1999), largely without specific government promotion. 8

While much of the agricultural leadership, particularly in those areas in which free-holding farmers predominated, sought to improve agriculture as one branch of business, they were divided by regionalism, by the specificity of their different cropping regimes, as well as by other, less well analyzed, ethnic and religious differences (Gjerde 1997, Salamon 1992, Wells 1996). As Shulman indicates, the National Farmers Union was specifically concerned about the effects of federal policies on the growing class of tenants, and the increasing failure of the “tenure ladder” to provide rungs for their movement from tenantry to farm ownership. Other farm organizations, notably the Grange and the Farm Bureau, drew their membership primarily from propertied farmers, and so were less concerned with the growing class divisions within agriculture.

Feingold and Skocpol (1995) argue that the U.S. state’s capacity was greater in the arena of agriculture than in other sectors of the society. Beginning with the establishment of the Department of Agriculture (USDA) and passage of the Morrill Act establishing the Land Grant Colleges in 1862, the federal government created powerful institutions which, while central to U.S. farming, were independent of it. Through the USDA and its counterpart in the various states, a system of higher and adult education aimed at improving agriculture and farm life developed.

The great political struggles of the Populist Era, however, focused on the private sector: farmers sought protection from and regulation of those who provided credit, markets, and transportation for farmers and the commodities they produced. In opposition to creditors and to manufacturers, they demanded easy money and low tariffs from the federal government. Farmers themselves remained served by, but not enmeshed in, those governmental agencies specific to agriculture. Canada, as Knuttila demonstrates, was similar.

By the twentieth century, federal regulatory regimes had ameliorated many of farmers’ greatest complaints against the railroads and marketers, and the currency issue had been settled. But, with a now-dominant non-agricultural population, the problem of food supply became important not only to farmers but (as during the U.S. Civil War) to the nation at large. As Knuttila demonstrates, the growing war in Europe, with its strong demand for wheat, also played a decisive role in the second decade of the century.

During this period the U.S. and Canada took somewhat different courses: Canada created a state board that directly oversaw the marketing of Canadian wheat, while the U.S., as Shulman demonstrates, solved the perceived problem of insufficient and usurious agricultural credit through a federally-supported private institution, the system of private Land Banks. But the path had been staked out: from now on the modern state would play an ever increasing role in administering the economy, throwing its resources, as well as its laws and supporting administrative apparatus, into the larger society. 9

The outlines of the debates that have engaged those concerned with agriculture and rural life throughout the twentieth century can be discerned in the arguments that developed over the Federal Farm Loan Act, which was passed in 1916 after six years of deliberation. Shulman documents, in contrast to other interpretations, that the initiative for credit reform did not originate with the organizations that represented farmers. It came, rather, from urban agrarians and business interests who were concerned, among other things, by the failure of farmers to increase agricultural productivity. These business interests and progressive elites, Shulman argues, set the policy agenda and successfully framed the terms of the debate. Farmers, through their organizations, followed behind. When farm organizations supported the business and urban interests, their voices were heard. When, however, they brought up different concerns, as did the National Farmers Union with its concern for small farmers and farm tenants, they were unable to shape the debate. This does not appear as an issue of “he who pays the piper plays the tune,” so much as the strategic ability to stake out and defend positions. The political process, Shulman posits, is as much shaped by the issues that are placed in the public arena and how they are framed as it is by the raw power of different classes. “Interests,” as Wells argued, are not transparent. In Shulman’s telling they are defined through the process of public debate (see also Reisner, section 4).

The New Deal dramatically accelerated the development of state institutions that became known as the “welfare state.” Gilbert and Summers examine the New Deal. They seek to redeem a tradition that Gilbert names “low modernism” against the critique of statist programs that, as Summers argues, has accreted on both the left and the right since the New Deal. Gilbert does this through close analysis of a specific program that aimed to marry intellectuals, experts, and farmers in an institutionalized planning process. Gilbert argues that key administrators within the USDA strongly promoted programs that would empower people at the local level. These bureaucrats established grass-roots planning out of their attachment to Dewey’s theories of participatory democracy (Gilbert 2000) and as a tactical move in their ongoing battle with a conservative coalition that sought to roll back many aspects of the New Deal. These battles took place on many levels, fought in the public arena, in the creation of coalitions of interest groups, and in battles behind closed doors in Washington, D.C. We will never know whether or not a truly democratic planning process could have been established had it been allowed to proceed, for by 1942 the program was eliminated through legislative action.

Here Mary Summers takes up the story. She describes the activities of one local program in Green County, Georgia, studied by Arthur Raper (1943), as exemplary of the programs Gilbert describes through the lens of Washington, D.C. She then analyzes Jamie Whitten, who arrived in Congress in 1941 as these and other USDA programs directed at low income farmers and farm workers were under fierce attack. From his position on the Agriculture Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee Whitten became a leader in these attacks. As chairman of the subcommittee and, from 1979-1993 chair of the full committee, he became known as the “permanent Secretary of Agriculture.” In her sketch, she exposes Whitten’s class and racial interests as well as his actions within the legislative structure to defeat his enemies. This structure, she reveals, is not only the legislative arena for hammering out national laws; it also provides a privileged platform from which to shape the public discourse. If one conceives of these battles using the analytic tools of “resource mobilization” (McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald 1996), the office of Representative can be a powerful resource indeed, particularly when combined with an organized constituency and a rhetorical tool kit that resonates widely in a large public.

Summers’ essay also demonstrates the power of a story well told, in which the author situates herself within the story without making the story revolve around her. This stance, theorized by feminist and post-modern critics of putatively objective science (Hartsock 1987), allows the scholar to signal the reader of her own location within the narrative, while respecting the autonomy of the events she analyzes.

Barnett, an agricultural economist, shifts our gaze from state institutions specifically dealing with agriculture, to the state’s financial regulators, telling a compelling story of the farm crisis of the 1980s. His keen analysis brings the key players and processes to the fore as farmers, now defining themselves as investors as much as agricultural producers, calibrated their investment and production decisions to the rapidly changing fiscal environment of the 1970s. The arena in which they operated was created by agents far beyond their control: The U.S. government had a strong interest in balancing U.S. foreign trade (simultaneously eliminating agricultural surpluses) through pushing U.S. agricultural products onto global markets. It passed tax policies that stimulated production at the same time that monetary policy stimulated inflation. In 1973, the oil producing nations, through OPEC, effectively drove up the price of oil, sending petrodollars sloshing through the international financial system. This created powerful inflationary pressures worldwide, even as it initially created strong markets for American agricultural products and, with it, spiraling land prices.

The Republicans who took over the reins of government from the Democrats in 1980 did not have agriculture at the center of their concerns. Rather, they sought to resolve the “stagflation” that had begun to seem endemic--high unemployment rates coupled with high inflation rates. As Barnett indicates, the tax cuts implemented as part of their “supply-side” efforts were no more rational than the previous administration’s tax and fiscal policies. But the money managers at the Federal Reserve did, finally, manage to drive interest rates higher than the rate of inflation. It also dramatically strengthened the dollar relative to other currencies, pricing U.S. agricultural commodities out of world markets that were already feeling the pinch of debt repayment. The shift in the financial landscape sent land values plummeting. The farm crisis of the mid-1980s began in earnest.

The farmer of the 1980s was a significantly different actor than the farmer of the early twentieth century. Fundamental assumptions had shifted, no longer grounded in a production system in which the vast majority of farmers provisioned significant parts of their operations through non-market institutions. By the 1970s, almost all farmers had adopted business practices, and the largely college educated young men and women who stepped into their parents’ shoes were predisposed to seek out expert advice. These experts, Barnett shows, utterly failed to grasp the lineaments of the farm crisis of the 1980s as it unfolded.

Dudley then picks up the story with a close ethnographic account of the farm crisis in a community in western Minnesota. In an account congruent with O’Connor’s argument, made in Chapter 2 by Rudy, Dudley exposes the way that the cultural foundations of capitalism erode and bring to crisis the community forms through which people create meaningful and supportive relationships. What, she asks, makes possible the personal, individual, actions that seem, when one steps into larger arena, an inexorable performance of an economically determined script? Her narrative probes the ways that people create notions of self and morality that cast out those who betray that morality by their financial failure. This culture, she argues, is founded on an “entrepreneurial self” that radically individualizes even as it requires adherence to larger community norms. 10

Kenhelm Burridge (1969), an anthropologist who sought to understand social movements created by Melanesians in the face of British colonization, posited that every society establishes modes of what he termed “redemption.” The redemptive process, as he conceived it, is “indicated by the activities, moral rules, and assumptions about power which, pertinent to the moral order and taken on faith, not only enable a people to perceive the truth of things, but guarantee that they are indeed perceiving the truth of things.” It has to do with “the process whereby individuals attempt to discharge their obligations in relation to the moral imperatives of the community” (Burridge 1969:6-7). This process establishes the bases on which people recognize the worth and dignity of themselves and others. As numerous historians have persuasively argued, the terms for conferring worth and dignity have continually shifted as commodity relations supplanted those mediated through reciprocity and what Mauss ([1927] 2000) termed “gifts.” This replacement was not solely a shift in exchange relationships; rather, it entailed a broad set of ideas and practices associated with “modernity.” These ideas and practices, Arce and Long (2000:1) argue, are “appropriated and re-embedded in locally-situated practices, thus accelerating the fragmentation and dispersal of modernity into constantly proliferating modernities.” The “entrepreneurial self” discerned by Dudley is characteristic of one of these specific modernities. It is neither the self of the “captain of industry” who manages a vast industrial and financial empire, nor the self of the farmers who, coming from a variety of regional and national backgrounds, settled the U.S. countryside during the nineteenth century. It is, rather, a negotiation between past and future, a moment of crisis when a contested and always improvised moral order makes its imperatives felt.

Members of farming communities developed what Dudley calls the entrepreneurial self out of a complex negotiation between a proselytizing industrial order and a range of ethnic traditions that variously embodied the old American yeoman attachment to autonomy and independence. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, only the Amish among American farmers remain committed to maintaining a community that simultaneously requires individual initiative and subordination to a covenanted community. In the wheat growing regions of the U.S. and Canada, Hutterites have created small communities governed through theocratic gerontocracies that effectively compete with entrepreneurial farmers. 11 Elsewhere, the individualized entrepreneurial farmer predominates, and the bonds of community thin to the point of disappearing.

Dudley’s account demonstrates the permeability of individual identity; that the belief in an autonomous individual requires a social ordering of values through which a person and those around them recognize that they succeed or fail. Like the economists of whom Barnett writes, few members of farming communities were able to translate system failure into a reformulation of the codes for establishing worth and value. Those who did, aligning themselves with political activists, were largely shunned, by their profession, in the case of agricultural economists, and by other members of their communities, in the case of farmers. The existing set of assumption about the truth of things proved more powerful than the imagination of either experts or those directly affected. This, also, is political, insofar as the contradictions were sutured over and the existing system of power remained largely unchallenged. When crisis exposes large numbers of people to extraordinary personal pain and threatens the viability of important institutions, as did the farm crisis, the failure of imaginative alternatives to be effectively placed in the public arena is as significant as their success.

The failure was not total, however. Rather, it moved into other domains. Although the farm crisis spurred only minor reforms to the existing agricultural system, including agricultural policy, it fueled a growing set of alternatives. Most of these derived from the organic and sustainable farming movement, whose roots lie more in the environmental movement that emerged from the social unrest of the 1960s and ‘70s than from within the farming community itself. That diverse grouping of individuals and organizations lumped together as “environmentalists” came to provide the conceptual tools to expose the contingent nature of “conventional agriculture.” The environmentalist critique of conventional agriculture struck at its epistemological, institutional, and pragmatic assumptions. Through their sustained critique of conventional agriculture, environmentalists challenged the organization of power within the society as a whole, not simply in the domain of agricultural production.

These challenges are foundational: the radical actors within the environmental movement posit fundamentally new modes of redemption, to use Burridge’s terminology. They seek not only new forms of governmental power, but new modes of regulation and governance. They seek, as Friedmann’s article in this volume demonstrates, to fundamentally rearrange social life, from the intimacies of daily life to the overarching structures of global commerce.

DeLind captures well the tension within one practical program developed within the environmental movement, Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). Community Supported Agriculture began in part as an instrumental means to combine capital with labor to grow needed crops for a reliable market by low-income farmers (Whateley 1987). However, it quickly became a vehicle through which to imagine a radically reformed system of agricultural production, in which consumers and producers break down these identities and meet one another in a community based more on notions of reciprocity than commerce. All of the participants, however, live inside a world regulated through commodity exchange and virtually all rely on the institutions of the existing order to maintain daily life. As DeLind documents, the utopian vision often falters in the face of the farmer’s day-to-day necessity to make farm payments, buy supplies, and get the crop out and distributed. And, on the consumers’ side, work in urban jobs and complex family responsibilities do not easily give individuals the ability to include a demanding rural activity and new set of social relationships. In this case, imagination outstrips institutional and individual capacity.

DeLind uses Stevenson’s (1998) notion of “warrior work” and “builder work” to distinguish between actions that directly engaged the existing order through political action and those that seek to institutionalize viable alternatives in the interstices of the existing order. The CSA movement, while specifically oriented toward creating alternative relationships between producers and consumers, does have its directly political dimensions. Members of CSAs work for altered regulations; they seek governmental support for research and other support; they enlist government functionaries and agencies (for example the Cooperative Extension Service) for various kinds of services and advocacy.

The radical revisioning of human/nature and human/human relationships by the environmental movement moved into other domains, as well. The articles by Hall and Reisner directly address the processes through which the imaginable becomes part of public debate. They demonstrate the power of language as a political resource. Hall analyzes the battle over the meaning of the term “sustainable agriculture,” while Reisner takes up the hotly contested domain of biotechnology. Both these articles assume, and simultaneously demonstrate, the power of discourse in creating larger social realities. The theoretical debates of the mid-twentieth century, over whether or not people’s concepts determined social forms, has been largely settled. Both ethnographic demonstration and various strands of language theory have largely persuaded both Marxists and utilitarians that human beings construct their social universes through discourse. In the process, the concept of “discourse” has been enlarged from pointing solely to language to including other orderings of cognition, including the ordering of space and time. Questions of power have, therefore, moved to the center, since “order” does not appear spontaneously but is, rather, instituted and reproduced within contingent yet durable regimes. The shift from “symbol” to “cognition” as the central aspect of discourse has, simultaneously, permitted actors to reappear as central to the creation of social relations (Giddens 1979,1987, Long and Long 1992). In this sense, the CSAs analyzed by DeLind create new discourses of knowledge and power as much by the new social relations they instantiate (or seek to instantiate) as by the purely linguistic programs and arguments they put forward.

Hall and Reisner both deal with the more restricted notion of discourse as language. Their analyses, however, point toward the ways that battles in the political arena over the meanings of terms create effects in the political process as a whole--how resources are distributed, who gets targeted by regulations, and so forth. As Shulman demonstrates in his study of the establishment of the Farm Credit System, durable institutions are created through both setting agendas for public debate and framing the specific terms of debate. 12

Hall takes up the discourse of “sustainable agriculture” in Canada. Symbols, as anthropologist Victor Turner (1974) observed, are multivocalic, and their varied meanings are most easily seen in what he termed social dramas. Most terms carry multiple meanings even when closely defined; their meanings become vastly, and unpredictably, extended when deployed as metaphors and other tropes (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). They therefore become “resources” to be deployed in strategic action (McAdam, JcCarthy, and Zald 1996). Although the term “sustainable” was first established in public debate by organic and other farmers who sought alternatives to industrialized agricultural production, it contains, as Hall demonstrates, sufficient ambiguity to be vulnerable to appropriation by proponents of conventional agriculture. In this case, Hall argues, the hegemony of the existing order becomes reinstantiated specifically through a strategy to redefine “sustainable” so that it conforms to normal business practices. This process is significantly different from that analyzed by DeLind, in which the hegemony of commercial transactions became revealed in the daily practices that undermined the viability of an articulated vision. In both instances, however, the power of an institutionalized order becomes revealed through the attempts by mobilized actors to transform the system.

Reisner presents a somewhat different outcome. In the case of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), a coalition of groups that she characterizes as “social movement organizations” (SMOs) successfully placed the regulation of GMOs on the public agenda, and they have been able to continue to frame the debate largely in their terms. The degree to which promoters of the use of GMOs in agriculture will be successful remains undecided. To a considerable extent, it will be decided by forces outside the purview of the U.S. government. Anti-SMO rhetoric has been sufficiently persuasive, both in the U.S. and elsewhere, to alter popular consciousness and actions regarding food safety. Large fast food chains like McDonald’s now screen out GMO products, fearing customer backlash; and the European Union has steadfastly rejected foodstuffs containing genetic modifications. In an economy in which consumer choice plays a large role, extra-governmental action demonstrably affects the relations of power. The food system, which has long been focused on production and mass distribution, now has to take directly into account consumer concerns for their health and for the ecosystem.

Reisner’s study also provides a robust methodology for studying the contestation of political discourses, “critical discourse analysis.” This method provides some tools with which to expose the “universe of the undiscussed” (Bourdieu 1977), the common-sense, taken-for-granted foundations of understanding. Insofar as scientific methodologies attempt to push the boundaries of both sensory and cognitive perception, critical discourse analysis is such a methodology. Grounded on the assumption that discourses reproduce existing relations of domination, generally “behind the backs” of actors, it provides a tool for exposing the relations of power as they are expressed and instantiated in language.

This collection ends with Friedmann’s envisioning of a new ordering of nature and culture, of geographic space, of temporality. It provides a new set of metaphors derived from ecology and the improvisational art of jazz to imagine a future unimaginable within hegemonic discourses. It envisions, in short, a fundamentally transformed ordering of knowledge and power.

-0-

Notes

1. This process has been widely documented in the scholarly and popular media. See, e.g., Danbom 1995, Dudley 2000, Duncan 1999, Fitchen 199 , Salamon in press, Davidson 1990. back to text

2. The critique of development has been broad, ranging from practical demonstrations of the failure of many development policies, to a thorough-going critique of the paradigm of “development” and “modernization.” See, e.g., in addition to Ferguson, , Long and Long (1992), Escobar (1995), Scott (1998). back to text

3. The study of agriculture and of rural life has been, to a great extent, marginalized within the central disciplines of the social sciences and humanities, and placed within specialized areas of colleges of agriculture within the Land Grant universities where researchers’ roles are largely instrumental and policy-oriented (Hurt 1996, Marcus and Lowitt 1999). back to text

4. Finegold and Scokpol (1995), in their analysis of the agricultural New Deal, provide an excellent summary of theories of the relationship between state and society, including what they term pluralist, elite, Marxist, and rational choice theories, as well as their own institutional theory. back to text

6. An important debate on the class status of “petty commodity producers” appeared in the pages of the Journal of Peasant Studies in the late 1970s. See especially Friedmann (1978, 1980), Mann and Dickinson (1978, 1980); see also Buttel and Newby (1980). These analyses tended to view economic relations as determinative of other historical processes. Scott (1998:196-201) argues that early twentieth century modernizers, both capitalist and socialist, sought to transform agriculture from individual to industrial systems of production, but that ideology more than specific interest drove their efforts. back to text

7. Objects created through capitalist relations of production enter the universe of circulation not only as “commodities,” existing as pure exchange values, but also as useful things, that enter the universe of human meaning-making. The relationship between exchange values and use values remains a complex problem in social analysis (see Appadurai 1988). back to text

8. After World War II, the government, through the Agricultural and Home Extension Service and through providing support for agricultural production primarily to men, promoted the role of consumer to farm women (Adams 1993, 1994b; Fink 1986; Jellison 1993). back to text

9. The U.S. and Canadian governments had always used the lands wrested through military and other means from Indian peoples (but not from French or Mexican inhabitants of acquired territory) as important federal powers. Federal implementation of land reclamation and irrigation works coincides with the distribution of virtually all arable land to private hands. back to text

10. Dudley (this volume, 2000) explicitly argues with those who pose distinct “ideal types”--farmers adhering to an entrepreneurial (Salamon 1992) or industrial (Barlett 1993) ethos contrasted with those adhering to a “yeoman” ethos. back to text

11. The success of these two religious groups in expanding their numbers as agricultural producers indicates that alternatives exist to “conventional” farming effected through individual entrepreneurship. They expose the contingent nature of what are often experienced as inevitable, “natural” social forms. back to text

12. Erving Goffman has been the most influential sociologist to develop the concept of “frame” to describe the set of meanings that are condensed into a “shorthand” that can then be deployed, putatively unambiguously, in public debate. He also use a dramaturgical analogy to interpret social action. See Goffman (1974), Snow and Benford (1988). back to text

References Cited

Adams, Jane. 1993. Resistance to "Modernity:" Southern Illinois Farm Women and the Cult of Domesticity. American Ethnologist 20(1):89-113.

Adams, Jane. 1994a. The Transformation of Rural Life: Southern Illinois 1890-1990. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Adams, Jane. 1994b.Government Policies and the Changing Structure of Farm Women's Livelihood: A Case from Southern Illinois. In The Economic Anthropology of the State, ed, Elizabeth M. Brumfiel, 65-92. Monographs of the Society for Economic Anthropology. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.

Adams, Jane. 1997. Quiesence Despite Privation: Explaining the Absence of a Farm Laborers' Movement in Southern Illinois. Comparative Studies in Society and History. 39(3):550-571.

Appadurai, Arjun, ed.1988. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge University Press.

Arce, Alberto, and Norman Long. 2000. Anthropology, Development and Modernities: Exploring Discourses, Counter-tendencies and Violence. Routledge: London and New York.

Blanke, David. 2000. Sowing The American Dream: How Consumer Culture Took Root in the Middle West, Columbus: Ohio University Press.

Barlett, Peggy. 1993. American Dreams, Rural Realities: Family Farms in Crisis. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977 Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Burridge, Kenhlem. 1969. New Heaven New Earth: A Study of Millenarian Activities. New York: Basil Blackwell.

Buttel, Frederick H. and Howard Newby, eds. 1980. The Rural Sociology of the Advanced Societies: Critical Perspectives. London: Allanheld, Osmun.

Cochrane, Willard W. 1993. The Development of American Agriculture: A Historical Analysis. 2nd. Ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Danbom, David B. 1995. Born in the Country: A History of Rural America. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Davidson, Osha Gray. 1990. Broken Heartland: The Rise of America’s Rural Ghetto. New York: Free Press

Dudley, Kathryn Marie. 2000. Debt and Dispossession: Farm Loss in America’s Heartland. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Duncan, Cynthia M. 1999. Worlds Apart: Why Poverty Persists in Rural America. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Escobar, Arturo. 1995. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Ferguson, James. 1990. The Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Cambridge University Press.

Finegold, Kenneth, and Theda Skocpol. 1995. State and Party in America’s New Deal. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Fitchen, Janet. 1991. Endangerd Spaces, Enduring Places: Change, Identity, and Survival in Rural America. Westview.

Friedland, William H, Lawrence Busch, Frederick H. Buttel, and Alan P. Rudy, eds. 1991. Toward a New Political Economy of Agriculture. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Friedmann, Harriet. 1978. Simple Commodity Production and Wage Labour in the American Plains. Journal of Peasant Studies 6:70-100.

Friedmann, Harriet. 1980. Household Production and the National Economy: Concepts for the Analysis of Agrarian Formations. Journal of Peasant Studies 7(2):158-84.

Giddens, Anthony. 1987. Social Theory and Modern Sociology. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Gilbert, Jess. 2000. Eastern Urban Liberals and Midwestern Agrarian Intellectuals: Two Group Portraits of Progressives in the New Deal Department of Agriculture” Agricultural History 74(2):162-80.

Gjerde, Jon. 1997. The Minds of the West: Ethnocultural Evolution in the Rural Middle West, 1830-1910. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Goffman, Erving. 1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Hartsock, Nancy C.M. 1987. The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism. In Feminism and Methodology, ed. Sandra Harding, pp. 157-180. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Harvey, David. 1989. The Condition of Post-Modernity. Cambridge, Mass: Basil Blackwell.

Heffernan, William D. 2000. Concentration of Ownership and Control in Agriculture. In Hungry for Profit: The Agribusiness Threat to Farmers, Food, and the Environment, ed. Fred Magdoff, John Bellamy Foster, and Frederick H. Buttel, 61-75. New York: Monthly Review Press,.

Hurt, R. Douglas, ed. 1996. Special Issue on Twentieth-Century Farm Policies. Agricultural History 70(2).

Jellison, Katherine. 1993. Entitled to Power: Farm Women and Technology, 1913-1963. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press.

Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Long, Norman and Ann Long, eds. 1992. Battlefields of Knowledge: The Interlocking of Theory and Practice in Social Research and Development. Routledge: London and New York.

Magdoff, Fred, John Bellamy Foster, and Frederick H. Buttel, eds. 2000. Hungry for Profit: The Agribusiness Threat to Farmers, Food, and the Environment. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Mann, Susan and James Dickenson. 1978. Obstacles to the Development of a Capitalist Agriculture. Journal of Peasant Studies V(4):466-481.

Mann, Susan and James Dickenson. 1980. State and Agriculture in Two Eras of American Capitalism, In The Rrural Sociology of the Advanced Societies: Critical Perspectives, ed. Frederick H. Buttel and Howard Newby, 283-325. London: Allanheld, Osmun.

Marcus, Alan I., and Richard Lowitt, eds., 1990. Special Symposium Issue on the United States Department of Agriculture in Historical Perspective. Agricultural History 64(2).

Mauss, Marcel, 2000 (1927). W. D. Halls, translator. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Foreward by Mary Douglas. W.W. Norton and Co.

McAdam, Doug, John D. McCarthy, and Mayer N. Zald, eds. 1996. Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Mooney, Patrick H. 1988. My Own Boss? Class, Rationality, and the Family Farmer. Boulder, Colo: Westview Press.

O'Connor, James. 1973. Fiscal Crisis of the State. New York: St. Martin's Press.

O'Connor, James. 1988. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism: A Theoretical Introduction. Capitalism Nature Socialism 1:11-38.

O'Connor, James. 1998. Natural Causes: Essays in Ecological Marxism. New York: Guilford Press.

Ownby, Ted. 1999. American Dreams in Mississippi: Consumers, Poverty, and Culture 1830-1998. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press

Salamon, Sonya. 1992. Prairie Patrimony: Family, Farming, and Community in the Midwest. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Salamon, Sonya. in press. Rural Rebirth: Suburbanization of the Small Town. [working title] University of Chicago Press.

Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Scott, Roy V. 1972. The Reluctant Farmer. Urbana: University of Illiinois Press.

Snow, David E. and Robert Benford. 1988. Ideology, Frame Resonance, and Participant Mobilization. In From Structure to Action: Comparing Social Movement Research Across Cultures, ed. Bert Klandermans, Hanspeter Kriesi, and Sidney Tarrow. Greenwich: JAI Press, pp. 197-217.

Stevenson, G. W. 1998. Warrior Work and Builder Work: Exploring Responses to Bi-polar Enterprise Structures in Advanced Agri-food Systems. A presentation to the joint meetings of the Agriculture, Food and Human Values Society and the Association for the Study of Food and Society, San Francisco. June 6.

Turner, Victor. 1974. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Wells, Miriam. 1996. Strawberry Fields: Politics, Class, and Work in California Agriculture. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

Whateley, Booker T. and the editors of The New Farm. 1987. How to make $100,000 farming 25 acres (alternate title: Booker T. Whatley's Handbook on How to Make $100,000 Farming on 25 Acres). Emmaus, PA: The Regenerative Agriculture Association (Rodale Institute).