Toward a Global Organic Culture: Ethnographic Perspectives on Wwoofing Practices in Peru and New Zealand

In this thesis, I explore the meaning behind sustainable living among organic farmers and their families in two countries. It is based on original, ethnographic research that I conducted in New Zealand in fall 2012 and Peru in summer 2012 with support from the Department of Sociology and Anthropology Meerwarth Undergraduate Research Fund. In carrying out my research I relied on participant-observation, semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and writing ethnographic fieldnotes. Drawing on contemporary scholarship in the anthropology of food and the environment, my thesis contributes to cross-culturally understandings of sustainability and local and global foodways. Specifically, I will interpret the meaning and significance of my informants’ decision to live sustainably through their participation in wwoofing. The global network of wwoofing aims to connect volunteers interested in learning about organic farming techniques with farmers looking for labor assistance. Volunteers exchange work for food, accommodation, knowledge, and experience. As a method of farming and a subjective ideological orientation, this global movement allows travelers from all over the world to experience organic lifestyles worldwide. In my thesis, I connect my experiences of organic living in Peru and New Zealand. In comparing wwoofing practices in these two field sites, I argue that despite observable differences in organic practices, a global organic culture is emerging. Here I highlight some shared features of this global organic culture, such as food authenticity, sustainability of the earth, and a personal connection of individuals to the land. The global organic culture emphasizes a conscious awareness of what is going into one’s body and why. Using food as an expression of values and beliefs, organic farmers reconnect to the land and their food in attempts to construct an alternative identity. By focusing on food authenticity, my informants develop vast relationships with the land, which shapes their identity and creates new forms of self-enhancement.

Placing Identity: Town, Land, and Authenticity in Nunavut, Canada

Recent demographic changes have made settlement patterns in the Canadian Arctic increasingly urban. Iqaluit, capital of Canada’s newest territory, Nunavut, is home to the largest concentration of Inuit and non-Inuit populations in the Canadian North. Despite these trends, Inuit cultural identity continues to rest heavily on the perception that to learn how to be authentically Inuit (or to be a better person), a person needs to spend time out on the land (and sea) hunting, fishing, trapping, and camping. Many Inuit also maintain a rather negative view of urban spaces in the Arctic, identifying them as places where Inuit values and practices have been eclipsed by Qallunaat (‘‘white people’’) ones. Some Inuit have even gone so far as to claim that a person is no longer able to be Inuit while living in towns like Iqaluit. This article examines those aspects of Canadian Inuit identity, culture, and tradition that disfavor the acceptance of an urban cultural identity. Based on ethnographic research conducted on Baffin Island in the mid 1990s and early 2000s, the many ways Iqaluit and outpost camp Inuit express the differences and similarities between living on the land and living in town are described. Then follows an examination of how the contrast of land and town is used in the rhetoric of Inuit politicians and leaders. Finally, a series of counterexamples are presented that favor the creation of an authentic urban Inuit identity in the Arctic, including recent attempts on the part of the Nunavut Territorial Government to make education and wage employment in the region more reliant on Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, or Inuit traditional knowledge.1

Be United, Be Virtuous: Composite Culture and the Growth of Shirdi Sai Baba Devotion

In one popular devotional poster the Indian god-man Shirdi Sai Baba (d. 1918) gazes out at the viewer, his right hand raised in blessing. Behind him are a Hindu temple, a Muslim mosque, a Sikh gurdwara, and a Christian church; above him is the slogan, “Be United, Be Virtuous.” In his lifetime, Shirdi Sai Baba acquired a handful of Hindu and Muslim devotees in western India. Over the past several decades, he has been transformed from a regional figure into a revered persona of pan-Indian significance. While much scholarship on religion in modern India has focused on Hindu nationalist groups, new religious movements seeking to challenge sectarianism have received far less attention. Drawing upon primary devotional materials and ethnographic research, this article argues that one significant reason for the rapid growth of this movement is Shirdi Sai Baba’s composite vision of spiritual unity in diversity, construed by many devotees as a needed corrective to rigid sectarian ideologies.

Im/possible Lives: Gender, Class, Self-Fashioning, and Affinal Solidarity in Modern South Asia

Drawing on ethnographic research and employing a micro-historical approach that recognizes not only the transnational but also the culturally specific manifestations of modernity, this article centers on the efforts of a young woman to negotiate shifting and conflicting discourses about what a good life might consist of for a highly educated and high caste Hindu woman living at the margins of a nonetheless globalized world. Newly imaginable worlds in contemporary Mithila,South Asia, structure feeling and action in particularly gendered and classed ways, even as the capacity of individuals to actualize those worlds and the “modern” selves envisioned within them are constrained by both overt and subtle means. In the context of shifting cultural anchors, new practices of silence, literacy, and even behaviors interpreted as “mental illness” may become tactics in an individual’s negotiation of conflicting self-representations. The confluence of forces at play in contemporary Mithila, moreover, is creating new structures of feeling that may begin to reverse long-standing locally held assumptions about strong solidarities between natal families and daughters, on the one hand, and weak solidarities between affinal families and new daughters-in-law, on the other.

Expanding Women's Worlds?: Development, Gender, and Environment in Rural Morocco

This honors thesis is an anthropological exploration of women's cooperatives in two regions of rural Morocco. Specifically, I am interested in how contemporary development projects such as the cooperative are understood by the peoples of these regions. By conducting first-hand ethnographic research among women's cooperatives in two drastically different environments of rural Morocco, I gain further insight into the roles that culture and geography play in determining the 'success' of cooperatives inlocal communities. In using the term 'success,' I will compare notions of success as used by both Western development organizations as well as local people in Morocco. I examine and analyze the very delicate and complex interaction that occurs between largely Western development agencies and local cultures particularly through the lens of gender. I will also convey the importance of an exchange of cultural practices through development projects rather than the imposition of one cultural system on another. In writing this thesis, I hope to contribute to the growing field of the anthropologyof development, a subset of cultural anthropology that examines international development practices and the economic, social, and political factors that have an impact on the local culture. I examine cooperatives from the perspectives of both the people whoparticipate in them through personal interviews as well as development institutions through an ongoing body of published literature. Focusing on gender implications that such development initiatives have on the rural cultures of Morocco, I argue that gender identities are crucial aspects of local cultures that must be addressed within development practices. On a broader scale, I argue that a deeper knowledge of local cultures is essential if development agencies are to be 'successful' in non-Western cultures.