Old Practices Chart New Waters

Abstract

This issue of CAFE looks at ways that old practices are reconsidered and reinvented to chart new courses through 21st-century dilemmas of subsistence, sustainability, and self-determination. In our first article, Veronica Davidov takes a qualitative approach and includes the discourse of cyberspace among her subjects. In Beyond Formal Environmentalism: Eco-Nationalism and the “Ringing Cedars” of Russia, Davidov provides insight into the eco-spiritual, “Anastasia” movement in contemporary Russia that in many ways parallels back-to-the-land, permaculture movements in the West. However, Davidov sees the movement as a distinct reaction to the failings of the postsocialist state, in which a disenchanted public creates an alternative, spiritual, and “heroic history” of itself that draws on “deep ecology, a nationalism that is consciously decoupled from the state,” new versions of old agricultural practices, and “now-extinct forms of nature governance” such as lineage-based land estates. While not quite equivalent to more formal concepts of environmentalism, Davidov tells us, this conservative, “eco-nationalist” movement has a critical place in understanding the changing field of ecology and politics in postsocialist Russian. In our second article, Michelle S. Roberts tells us, “everyday farmers in upland Laos negotiate and strategize a sea of constraints to try to feed their families,” with crop preferences and farming patterns influenced by work culture and ethnic background, among other constraints. In Understanding Farmer Decision Making in Northern Lao PDR, Roberts uses ranking, participant observation, and semi-structured interviews to examine farmer decision-making environments. Whether farmers adopt state-sanctioned cash cropping or remain with traditional products reflects Laos’ historically embedded system of patronage and socioethnic hierarchy. Similarly, among boys and men of the Jenu Kuruba of South India, how and why traditional knowledge systems are lost or retained is the topic of Schooling and Local Knowledge for Collecting Wild Honey in South India: Balancing Multifaceted Educations? Kathryn Demps, Jennifer Dougherty, Jenukalla MG, Francisco Zorondo-Rodríguez, Victoria Reyes-García, and Claude García relate levels of schooling to local knowledge around wild honey collection, a central domain of male local ecological knowledge. They assess honey collection knowledge using a multidimensional questionnaire and interpret results using smoothing spline curves. In this setting, a nuanced trade-off between acquiring a formal, westernized education and local ecological knowledge of wild honey collection appears to exist for males in this population. Susan Andreatta also reflects on past practice in the context of contemporary needs in Through the Generations: Victory Gardens for Tomorrow's Tables. Harkening back to the war-time era of “victory gardens” as patriotic acts, Andreatta explores ways for connecting people to growing local food at their home or in community environments and to sharing the harvest. She examines a community garden project at UNC Greensboro as a means of reconnecting with farming traditions of the American past. Two book reviews round out the journal. Andrea L. Rissing reviews Jack Glazier's Been Coming Through Some Hard Times: Race, History, and Memory in Western Kentucky. She notes that at its heart, the book is about race relations and community memory, though the town's agricultural economy provides a subtle but important backdrop. Mexican initiatives that aim to reroot maize as the centerpiece of a culturally and ecologically diverse local agricultural system are the topic of Corn Meets Maize: Food Movements and Markets in Mexico by Lauren E. Baker. Reviewed by Brandi Janssen, the book nicely captures the way that global ideas and processes inform local systems. Like agricultural practice, CAFE also struggles with issues of sustainability. As a publication of the American Anthropological Association, we face the contemporary dilemmas of many academic journals. Both submissions and journal costs are increasing, and we have had to ask authors to embrace a practice of small is beautiful. We thank this group of researchers for revising and tightening their manuscripts to fit our page constraints. Readers should feel free to contact authors for additional information, graphics, and references.