Todd A. Crane is Assistant Professor with the Tech-nology and Agrarian Development chair group,Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Nether-landsOn March 25, Robert Rhoades, a founding mem-ber of the Culture and Agriculture section of AAA,succumbed to pancreatic cancer in Athens, Georgia,where he had worked as a professor of anthropologysince 1991. Even beyond his immediate family andfriends, his passing has been felt deeply—crossingcommunities of anthropologists, indigenous rightsactivists, technical agricultural researchers, and devel-opment practitioners—reflecting the scope of hisinfluence, both as a researcher and as a person.I first met Bob in 1998, on a campus visit to UGAthe spring before starting my Ph.D. with him. As aneager and aspiring anthropologist interested in localknowledge, sustainable development, and small-holder agriculture, I asked him if he would recom-mend some summer reading, something to get meprimed for the grueling program of intellectualgrowth, which is graduate school. He just gave apuzzled but thoughtful look and said ‘‘Go readsome Wendell Berry.’’ Wendell Berry? The middleAmerican agrarian philosopher/poet/activist? Whatdoes he have to do with becoming an anthropologist?What am I getting myself into with this Bob Rhoadesfellow?I dutifully added Berry’s ‘‘The Unsettling ofAmerica: Culture and Agriculture’’ to my summerreading list. Berry is an eloquent and moving writer,but at the time I don’t think I fully appreciated what heshould mean to a budding anthropologist, why Bobrecommended him. Twelve years have gone by sincemy initial reading of the book, not to mention count-less thousands of pages of academic texts, all the whileunder the Bob’s guidance in one way or another. Inrevisiting my beat up copy of ‘‘Unsettling of America’’since Bob’s passing, I have rediscovered the essence ofwhat I learned from him, both as a professor and as aperson, and now fully understand why I received theunexpected assignment.My point is that food is a cultural product; it can-not be produced by technology alone. Thoseagriculturists who think of the problems of foodproduction solely in terms of technological inno-vation are oversimplifying both the practicalitiesof production and the network of meanings andvalues necessary to define, nurture, and preservethe practical motivations. That the discipline ofagriculture should have been so divorced fromother disciplines has its immediate cause in thecompartmental structure of the universities, inwhich complementary, mutually sustaining andenriching disciplines are divided, according to‘professions,’ into fragmented, one-eyed special-ties. [Berry 1995:43]Wendell Berry is not an anthropologist, a social sci-entist, or a scientist at all. I now believe that it isprecisely because Berry is an agrarian philosopher,poet, and activist, that Bob recommended this workas an introduction to anthropological education.Looking back, it was an exhortation to think beyonddiscipline and beyond science entirely, to thinkcritically—as a citizen of the world and as an in-dependent moral actor—about the significance ofmeaning in livelihoods, the modes of interaction be-tween technological change and social change, thedifferent ways that the social processes in agrariancommunities, science, business, and governmentdrive those changes, and most importantly how wechoose to position ourselves, personally and profes-sionally, in relation to these questions. It is onlythrough this reflection that we can meaningfully sit-uate our practice as scientists. Knowing that theacademic training and socialization would arrivesoon enough (and would be more than thorough inits saturation), the recommendation of Wendell Berrywas Bob’s way of suggesting that the anthropologicalproject, and the scientific project in general, needs tobe grounded in a compassionate, normative vision
Search from 250 M+ research papersSearch from 250 M+ research papers
Open Access
May 22, 2020
Sherwin Bitsui 