POINT OF VIEW
Anthropologists Should Return to the Roots of Their Discipline
By KENDALL M. THU
One of anthropology's major contributions to knowledge has been the discovery that the way human beings get, distribute, and consume food significantly affects their social, economic, and political
systems. No anthropologist would think of studying the Tsembaga people in New Guinea without examining how they raise pigs and tend their gardens, and the relationship of those activities to their political order. Nor could anthropologists hope to understand groups such as the !Kung in the Kalahari Desert of Africa without understanding the role of hunting, gathering, and food distribution in their society.
Thus, natural subjects for anthropologists to study today are the dramatic transformation of the systems of producing and distributing food in developed nations, and how that transformation in turn is affecting the nations' political economies. Yet many of my colleagues in cultural anthropology have chosen to ignore those topics. Instead, we have been pursuing trendy issues of postmodernism, blurred genres and identities, hermeneutic interpretation, voices of hegemony, and reflexivity. By turning our backs on our traditional research topics, we are making ourselves increasingly irrelevant to contemporary policy and politics.
The emergence of multinational food corporations that reach every corner of the world is a dramatic step in the evolution of contemporary culture. In 1950, nearly 65 per cent of the world's population was engaged in food production; the United Nations estimates that less than 30 per cent will be in 2025. As that percentage dwindles, we are witnessing a corresponding concentration of control of food production and distribution in the hands of multinational corporations.
Nestle, the largest food corporation in the world, does business virtually everywhere on earth, including in many of the areas where anthropologists traditionally have conducted field research -- such as India, Indonesia, Kuwait, Malaysia, and Thailand. Yet anthropologists working in those countries have paid little attention to what Nestle is doing there.
And I suspect that few anthropologists know that when they consume food products with labels such as Butterball, Hunt's, La Choy, Marie Callender's, Peter Pan, VanCamp's, Wesson, and even Orville Redenbacher, they're feeding the profits of ConAgra, the largest U.S. food corporation, and contributing to the increasing power of the major companies. In the United States, ConAgra is the second-largest beef packer, the third-largest owner of cattle feedlots, the third-largest pork packer, the fourth-largest poultry processor, the largest turkey producer, the largest processor of sheep, and the second-largest flour miller; it also provides barley malt for Budweiser, Foster's, Carlsberg, and Molson beers.
Bill Heffernan and his colleagues in the rural sociology department at the University of Missouri at Columbia have documented the concentration of food production and distribution in the United States. For example, they have shown that four beef packers now control the processing of about 87 per cent of all beef. And 50 per cent of U.S. farmland belongs to only 4 per cent of all farmland owners. In addition, more than 40 per cent of farmland owners do not farm their land but pay others to do that work. The separation of ownership from farm management threatens the environment, as the owners are less likely to be affected by any pollution that their farming may cause, nor can local people easily reach them with complaints.
Why should anthropologists, other scholars, and the public be concerned with the growing power of a few food companies? As the anthropologist Walter Goldschmidt, of the University of California at Los Angeles, writes in a chapter he contributed to Pigs, Profits, and Rural Communities, which E. Paul Durrenberger and I edited, "Cultures are not merely bundles of artifacts and customs. ... Cultures are integrated wholes, and a change in one area can send shock waves through all the others; when the change is in the basis of subsistence, the effects can be overwhelming."
The shock waves from the global industrialization of food production are dramatic. As anthropologists, we should build on our understanding of the way culture evolves -- from hunting and gathering, to food production and herding, to agriculture -- to understand those shock waves. We need to know much more about the social, economic, environmental, and political consequences of the global spread of industrial agriculture.
In the mid-1940s, in his classic ethnographic studies of California's Central Valley, Goldschmidt revealed the social pathologies that arise in communities associated with an industrial form of food production. Among the problems that Goldschmidt painstakingly documented were increasing socio-economic stratification, more conflict between workers and their employers, less-representative local government, and decreased participation in local civic and religious organizations.
Over the past 50 years, other scholars -- primarily sociologists -- have replicated his work using secondary sources, such as U.S. census data, in place of the firsthand ethnographic data that Goldschmidt collected. But one of the most notable consequences of his research was the attempt to suppress his conclusions by agricultural corporations.
The question is no longer, Is industrial agriculture bad for rural communities? We know the answer is Yes. The question now is, What is the relationship between the concentration of food production and the centralization of political power -- not only in the United States, but around the globe?
We don't need more ethnographic studies of local communities. Instead, anthropologists and other scholars should turn their attention to understanding how the leaders of the agribusiness world accrue power and manipulate or dismiss information about the negative consequences of industrial food production. The central nature of agriculture makes this more than just another case of influence peddling by big business.
Why aren't anthropologists studying issues such as food safety, agricultural pollution, and the health of farmers? For instance, after the U.S. Department of Agriculture allowed employees of the food-processing industry -- instead of outside inspectors -- to perform a larger share of meat inspections, the number of recalls of meat and poultry products rose dramatically, from 10 in 1997 to 24 in 1998. A 1998 report produced by the department and the Environmental Protection Agency noted that "agriculture is the most widespread source of pollution" in the rivers the report surveyed. Agriculture is also a leading cause of death and disabling injuries to U.S. workers.
Instead of focusing on those pressing issues, many anthropologists concentrate on marginal topics, presented in rhetoric that is inaccessible even to other members of our discipline. A sample of articles in the leading cultural-anthropology journals includes literary self-reflections, flowery tales of hegemonic discourse, and assertions of the relevance of anthropology to society based on solipsistic snake oil.
In 1969, the anthropologist Elman Service, writing in the Southwest Journal of Anthropology, described "mouthtalk" as a tendency to borrow methods and language because they are in vogue, "just as some foods are eaten for their taste rather than for their nourishment. It may be that usually the pleasure of mouthtalking comes ... from showing that one is privy to a new vogue." Unfortunately, postmodern cultural anthropologists are the discipline's most malnourished mouthtalkers.
The real issue is not whether one subscribes to postmodernism or its kindred approaches. The real issue is whether anthropology is becoming part of a larger social problem. When we anthropologists allow ourselves to be distracted from the proper subjects of our research, such as the growing power of multinational corporations in agriculture, we help benefit the elites who have increasing control over the production and distribution of basic resources. By not calling elites on the carpet, anthropologists let them get away with polluting our rivers, damaging the health of our farmers, and eroding our food safety.
Cultural anthropology is far from lost, but it may well be at a turning point. Robert W. Sussman, the new editor-in-chief of the American Anthropologist, the leading journal in anthropology, has proclaimed that "clarity of writing and minimal use of jargon are necessary in order to allow individuals from all subfields and fields outside of anthropology easy access to articles and review within the journal." Moreover, articles in the first issue of the journal under Sussman's leadership address in a forthright and cogent manner two pressing contemporary social issues that anthropologists are eminently qualified to understand: race and racism. In addition, membership in the Society for Applied Anthropology is increasing, at least in part because applied anthropologists have their methodologies and research topics firmly rooted in important social problems -- and as a result, there are more jobs for applied anthropologists than for other members of our discipline.
Despite those gains, lurking around every conference-room corner is the pestilence of mouthtalk, waiting to distract us from the basic problems of contemporary society and keep us from concentrating on the basic lessons of cultural anthropology. As the world's food system continues to change, we should expect shock waves in our social, economic, and political systems. Not attending to those shock waves and their cause is tantamount to anthropological blasphemy.
Kendall M. Thu is an adjunct assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Iowa and will become an assistant professor of anthropology at Northern Illinois University in the fall. With E. Paul Durrenberger, he edited Pigs, Profits, and Rural Communities (State University of New York Press, 1998).
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