Communities of Abundance

295 Pages·2017·1.61 MB·English

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Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School
5-2014
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Tony Nathan VanWinkle
University of Tennessee - Knoxville, [email protected]
Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss
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VanWinkle, Tony Nathan, "Communities of Abundance: Sociality, Sustainability, and the Solidarity
Economies of Local Food-Related Business Networks in Knoxville, Tennessee. " PhD diss., University of
Tennessee, 2014.
https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/2741
This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee
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[email protected].
To the Graduate Council:
I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Tony Nathan VanWinkle entitled
"Communities of Abundance: Sociality, Sustainability, and the Solidarity Economies of Local
Food-Related Business Networks in Knoxville, Tennessee." I have examined the final electronic
copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial
fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in
Anthropology.
Gregory V. Button, Major Professor
We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance:
Tricia Redeker-Hepner, Damayanti Banerjee, De Ann Pendry
Accepted for the Council:
Carolyn R. Hodges
Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School
(Original signatures are on file with official student records.)
Communities of Abundance: Sociality, Sustainability, and the
Solidarity Economies of Local Food-Related Business Networks in
Knoxville, Tennessee

A Dissertation Presented for the
Doctor of Philosophy
Degree
The University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Tony Nathan VanWinkle
May 2014
Acknowledgements

I would like to express my deepest appreciation and gratitude to my
dissertation committee: to my co-chairs, Gregory Button and Tricia Redeker-
Hepner for their continued patience, support, and encouragement, and for their
essential guidance and critical feedback through the draft stages of the
dissertation; to De Ann Pendry, who was always willing to listen to and comment
on new ideas; to Damayanti Banarjee, whose graduate seminars in environmental
sociology provided a forum for the initial explorations of many of the ideas that
appear in this dissertation. I would also like to thank Jon Shefner of the
sociology department.
Without the community and fellowship provided by fellow graduate
students I could not have made it through this process. I would especially like to
thank Erin Eldridge, Gabriella Maldonado, and Amanda Reinke for their support,
friendship, and feedback. I would also like to thank those undergraduate
students whose enthusiasm and engagement helped tremendously in the
formulation of parts of this dissertation. Thanks especially to Amanda
Cappanola, Lain Myers, Joey Green, Jordon Fouts, Casey Jackson, and Steven
Hodge. Also thanks to those friends who lent support and suggestions
throughout—Corey Dugan, Jason Robinson, Jill Houser, and Jason & Jodi Watts.
Lastly, this would not have been possible at all if not for the unconditional
support and encouragement I received from my family, who continued to believe
in me even when I didn’t. Thank you Nancy, and Greyson, and Cole.

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Abstract

This dissertation examines the socio-economic and eco-political dimensions of
contemporary localist food movements in Knoxville, Tennessee. More
specifically, it explores the implications of the mutualistic and networked socio-
economies (solidarity and/or community economies) of such movement
expressions as they are experienced, embodied, and understood among the
small-scale, independent food-related business owners who often serve as the
interpellators of such movements. This study is likewise concerned with ways in
which movement actors are actively shaping/creating place (via the processes of
emplacement), and relatedly, the way place—as an entity possessive of its own
accretions of environmental, historical, cultural, economic, and political
identities—shapes actors, therefore determining the textures of particular
localisms in return. Such processes and expressions, while explicitly oriented
toward the recovery and reassertion of the “local,” however, are also necessarily
embedded in the structural matrix of neoliberal globalization. Indeed, it is
precisely from the negotiation of such global/local dialectics that localist food
movements draw their oppositional political value. Accordingly, the study is also
preoccupied with the ways in which localist food movements, particularly in their
contestational positioning vis-a-vis the global industrial food system, are also
actively producing new, and perhaps critical-neoliberal subjectivities that bridge
post-Fordist symbolic and cultural economies on the one hand, with affective
solidarity economies on the other.

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Table of Contents

Introduction: Communities of Abundance? ………………………………………………1

Chapter 1: Visible Hands & Market Stands ..……………………..…………………….45

Chapter 2: Savor the Earth To Save It ………………………………………..………… 101

Chapter 3: Thinking Little . . . The Next Big Thing ……………………………….. 152

Chapter 4: Your Localism and Mine …………………………………………………… 209

Conclusions ………………………………………………………………………………………255

Bibliography ……………………………………………………………………………………...270

Vita ………………………………………………………………………………………………….289

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Introduction: Communities of Abundance?

This dissertation examines the socio-economic dimensions of contemporary
localist food movements in Knoxville, Tennessee. More specifically, it explores
the implications of the mutualistic and networked socio-economies (solidarity
and/or community economies) of such movement expressions as they are
experienced, embodied, and understood among the small-scale, independent
food-related business owners who often serve as the interpellators of such
movements. This study is likewise concerned with ways in which movement
actors are actively shaping/creating place (via the processes of emplacement),
and relatedly, the way place—as an entity possessive of its own accretions of
environmental, historical, cultural, economic, and political identities—shapes
actors, therefore determining the textures of particular localisms in return. Such
processes and expressions, while explicitly oriented toward the recovery and
reassertion of the “local,” however, are also necessarily embedded in the
structural matrix of neoliberal globalization. Indeed, it is precisely from the
negotiation of such global/local dialectics that localist food movements draw
their oppositional political value. Accordingly, the study is also preoccupied with
the ways in which localist food movements, particularly in their contestational
positioning vis-a-vis the global industrial food system, are also actively producing
new, and perhaps critical-neoliberal subjectivities that bridge post-Fordist
symbolic and cultural economies on the one hand, with affective solidarity
economies on the other.

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While indicative of long-term interests in food studies and alternative
economies, the particular nature and direction of the current study was gestated
in upper division classes focused around the intersecting topical arenas of
globalization, consumerism, and sustainability. Within these classes, the
regularly featured section on food is often the most popular among students.
Together, we find that contemporary food economies are a particularly resonant
lens through which to ground inquiries that can otherwise veer into abstraction.
After all, we all eat. Because of its contemporary dualistic nature as a major
global commodity imbricated in vast global exchange networks as well as an
intensely local product bound up in all sorts of affective relations—food is
perhaps especially illustrative of local/global discourses, particularly as these are
further refined through emergent ethical consumption practices like fair trade
and so-called artisanal food production.
Exploring the multivalence of such formations, in class we watched a short
profile and promotional video featuring Brooklyn, NY based business, Mast
Brothers Chocolate. This highly aestheticized production is built around scenes
featuring the company’s artisanal production processes (slow, deliberate,
exacting) along with video portraits and the philosophical musings of Rick and
Michael Mast, the young, hip proprietors of their namesake company; whose
style of self presentation and highly referential, romantic, even anachronistic
locution collapses entrepreneur and raconteur into a single persona. Indeed, the
theatricality, the performativity of it all, appears more like a stage-set from HBO’s
newest 19th century period drama, or a steam-punk costume party, than an
operating business. Considered within the context of the neoliberal present, it

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brought to mind a rather prescient quote from C. Wright Mills’ 1959 study, White
Collar: “. . . the saleman’s world has now become everyone’s world, and, in some
part, everybody has become a salesman” (161). Placing the current neoliberal
moment in the genealogy of post WWII countercultural expressions, William
Deresiewicz concurs, writing, “Today’s ideal social form is not the commune or
the movement or the individual creator as such; it’s the small business. Every
artistic or moral aspiration—music, food, good works, what have you—is
expressed in those terms” (2011).
The derisive tone of Deresiewicz’s article, revealingly entitled, “Generation
Sell,” however, provides a critical counterpoint for an examination of other,
perhaps heretofore largely invisible, possibilities inherent in such formations.
Deresiewicz’s contempt for business in the most broadly general terms expresses
a kind of essentialist anti-capitalist bias shared by several generations of scholars
whose work is located at the intersection of commerce and culture (and counter-
culture more specifically). In such formulations, capitalism is often a given—an
ahistorical, transcendent, and inexorable force (the prime mover) with unlimited
capacity to recuperate any and all challenges to its hegemony. In Heather
Paxson’s words, however, such an orientation “. . . reproduces a dichotomy
between quantitative market value and qualitative social values, such that the
pursuit of one is assumed to diminish the other” (2013: 8). Indeed, rather than
labeling an entire generation as sell outs simply because of their desire to
participate in economic activities (suggesting such desires are categorically
always already appropriated by capital)—what if the current generation of
independent, food-related business owners and their reticulate networks

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represent something other than capital’s ever enveloping recuperative tentacles,
and instead embody real, substantive, and even antagonistic economic
alternatives? This project explores just such possibilities through two principal
points of entry: 1. Solidarity and/or community economies—particularly those
affective, extra-economic interdependencies that adhere in the relational
practices cultivated and maintained by emplaced (local/place-based), food-
related small businesses, and; 2. Artisanal politics—the attendant shift toward a
political project that poses a radical revaluation of the small-scale, the handmade,
the local—all experiential categories fundamentally at odds with the operative
logic of global neoliberal capitalism. This latter analytic is likewise indicative of a
second socio-economic operative that will be variously identified as the cultural
and/or symbolic economy of the post-industrial Global North (and increasingly
characteristic of urban socio-economic realities everywhere). Thus, this project is
centrally concerned with examining the implications of the socio-economic
formations and cultural negotiations expressed in local food movements as these
adhere in the concatenations where solidarity and symbolic economies meet.

The Temporalities of Subjectivity: The Neoliberal Moment and the Politics of the
Possible
In many analyses undertaken in the social sciences, the current neoliberal
moment is presented as having created a totalizing global climate of market
fundamentalism in which the principle market subject, the consumer, or
somewhat more generously—the consumer-citizen—has been discursively
constructed as the primary locus of agency. In such a context, social and

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