Local Stagings, Global Productions: The Theatricality of Food Rituals in Landless Movement

Abstract

While most scholarly work in the 1990s focused on the use of ethnic identity and indigeneity as a critical tool for movement building in Latin America, this article turns toward new performative strategies in the 2000s. Through food performances—from showing and boasting about small-scale production to collective practices of cooking and feeding activists from a common pot—MST-Bolivia teaches campesinos about the importance of reclaiming land, territory, and food systems for indigenous peoples. The discourse of food sovereignty respatializes agriculture from global and corporate arenas to the local, as MST activists demand that food should be first and foremost a right and secondarily an item of trade. Yet there is no purity to their politics: daily contradictions exist between public declarations of sovereignty and collectivity and individualistic needs and desires. Despite such tensions, MST transports food traditions from regional to international arenas where they reassemble highly flexible organizational strategies capable of providing food for thousands of activists.