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Papers by Tony VanWinkle
Food, Culture & Society
Food, Culture & Society, 2022
In increasingly cross-cultural global settings, the performance and promotion of healthy food, "g... more In increasingly cross-cultural global settings, the performance and promotion of healthy food, "good" food (comida saludable) have become conflated with a narrowing range of iconic vegetable and "superfood" trends that often reflect the health and dietary preferences of an affluent and/or aspirational consumer culture. These colonizing cultivars, and the haute cuisine trends they embody, often displace indigenous food knowledge, techniques, and products already compromised by the penetration of processed foods. Through experiential pedagogical examples from Guatemala and Vermont, this paper explores the ways in which participatory, indigenous food and seed sovereignty curricula can help decolonize these newest kinds of hegemonic impositions and reaffirm traditional food systems.
I would like to express my deepest appreciation and gratitude to my dissertation committee: to my... more I would like to express my deepest appreciation and gratitude to my dissertation committee: to my co-chairs, Gregory Button and Tricia Redeker-Hepner for their continued patience, support, and encouragement, and for their essential guidance and critical feedback through the draft stages of the dissertation; to De Ann Pendry, who was always willing to listen to and comment on new ideas; to Damayanti Banarjee, whose graduate seminars in environmental sociology provided a forum for the initial explorations of many of the ideas that appear in this dissertation. I would also like to thank Jon Shefner of the sociology department. Without the community and fellowship provided by fellow graduate students I could not have made it through this process. I would especially like to thank Erin Eldridge, Gabriella Maldonado, and Amanda Reinke for their support, friendship, and feedback. I would also like to thank those undergraduate students whose enthusiasm and engagement helped tremendously in the formulation of parts of this dissertation. Thanks especially to Amanda
Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development, 2019
Based on research conducted with American Indian farmers and ranchers in southwestern Oklahoma, t... more Based on research conducted with American Indian farmers and ranchers in southwestern Oklahoma, this paper interrogates how agricultural resource bureaucracies differentially constrain or enable resilience to climate variability. We demonstrate that, while extreme weather events have been a persistent impediment to agriculture in the region, for American Indian farmers and ranchers such efforts have been equally hindered by a history of negative interaction with opaque and frequently indifferent systems of overlapping, yet disjunctive, bureaucracy. We are, thus, concerned with precisely how structural vulnerability and climate vulnerability are reproduced in tandem, and how such structural constraints have circumscribed nascent food sovereignty efforts. Drawing on our research into how farmers in southwest Oklahoma understand the interaction between the impacts — potential and/or experienced — of climate change and different relationships to agriculture and nature, we demonstrate how demoralization and social defeat emerge from the failures of local resource bureaucracies. Those agencies have, ironically, contributed to the vulnerability of the very population they have been established to serve. What we will show is that, caught between the opacity and bureaucratic posturing of two federal resource agencies, many American Indian landowners simply give up.
Drawing from a combination of archival and ethnographic evidence, this article examines historic ... more Drawing from a combination of archival and ethnographic evidence, this article examines historic and contemporary land tenure issues within a single county in southwestern Oklahoma. Specifi cally, we look at the way in which bureaucratic control has created a system that, while originally and ostensible intended to protect the " rights " of American Indian landowners, in fact functions to restrict, undermine, and redirect " access " to those lands, oft en to the economic benefi t of non-Indian farmers and ranchers. We consider how the leasing system administered by the Anadarko Agency of the Bureau of Indian Aff airs generates a " bundle of powers " that creates profound barriers to American Indian access to their own property. At work in the BIA's bundle of powers over access to this land are a host of actors and institutions, both contemporary and historic, that have worked together to shape the social relations that give rise to the current alienation from and dispossession of Oklahoma's Native-owned lands from their intended benefi ciaries. Indeed, this tenuous situation is refl ective of complexities attending continual retrenchments and revisions of federal Indian land policy— periodic reassertions of bureaucratic authority and control that reposition actors in perennially shift ing sociolegal relationalities. We seek if not to disentangle these relationships, then to at least render them visible and thus open to debate and intervention.
Based on ten months of mixed ethnographic and archival research, this study is concerned with way... more Based on ten months of mixed ethnographic and archival research, this study is concerned with ways in which contemporary agro-environmental subjectivities and practices in a southwestern Oklahoma farming community are rooted in the massive state-level interventions of the New Deal era and their successors. We are likewise concerned with how those interventions have become interdigitated with moral discourses and community ethics, as simultaneous expressions of both farmers' identities and the systems of power in which they practice farming. Through historic and ethnographic evidence, we demonstrate the ways in which the localization of American agricultural conservation and the attendant, edificatory role of resource bureaucracies have shaped contemporary practices and ideologies of natural resource stewardship among conventional farmers and ranchers.
Sustainability has become a keyword in popular discourses in the age of the celebrity chef. As s... more Sustainability has become a keyword in popular discourses in the age of the celebrity chef. As such, chefs and other actors working in the visible spaces and venues of a shared U.S. public culinary culture have become powerful spokespersons for sustainable food production, consumption, and localization. Unlike catastrophist discourses of environmentalisms’ of the past, however, this new discourse is often framed in terms of a politics of pleasure that redefines deliberate and considered hedonism as a kind of transformative eco-culinary engagement. In self-assigned missionary roles, chefs and other prepared food producers are often engaging in very deliberate pedagogical projects that link sensuality and sustainability. Likewise, and equally important to these efforts, is the centrality of regard—that is, attempts among chefs to re-embed exchange relations between producers and consumers, often serving as the critical interlocutors in such reassertions. This article is an exploration of how such processes have played out in the public culinary context of Knoxville, Tennessee and vicinity. As a mid-size city in the heart of southern Appalachia’s Ridge and Valley sub-region, Knoxville is undergoing a familiar process of urban revitalization that includes a robust food service sector. Amid shifting demographics and media flows bringing more cosmopolitan influences to the region, a range of actors have grounded these in a regionally specific food and farming heritage in order to reconnect consumers and producers, and cultivate a more sustainable and mutualistic local food system.
Conference Presentations by Tony VanWinkle
Local food movements are burgeoning in contemporary urban North America. While oriented toward th... more Local food movements are burgeoning in contemporary urban North America. While oriented toward the recovery and reassertion of the “local,” such movements are also embedded in the structures of economic globalization. This paper is an ethnographic and theoretical exploration of ways in which a particular group of urban local food movement actors assert the local—and the trans-local—through the symbolic capital of nostalgia and remembrance. Indeed, the sentimental mode of production that characterizes the “new old-fashioned-ism” of much local food movement activity depends fundamentally on tropes of collective and individual food memory in establishing its claims to moral authority.
While American bison were hunted to near-extinction in the last decades of the nineteenth century... more While American bison were hunted to near-extinction in the last decades of the nineteenth century, populations of the recently designated "national mammal" of the U.S. have recovered sufficiently to support a thriving contemporary ranching and food retail sector. This industry is supporting tribal initiatives driving both dietary revitalization and economic recovery, while also being subject to more conventional neoliberal market processes actively transforming bison products into elite culinary specialties endowed with great symbolic "staging value." Drawing on examples from Oklahoma, this paper discusses the cultural politics of these "interlaced trails," and the implications for tribal food sovereignty, sustainability, and health concerns.
Food, Culture & Society
Food, Culture & Society, 2022
In increasingly cross-cultural global settings, the performance and promotion of healthy food, "g... more In increasingly cross-cultural global settings, the performance and promotion of healthy food, "good" food (comida saludable) have become conflated with a narrowing range of iconic vegetable and "superfood" trends that often reflect the health and dietary preferences of an affluent and/or aspirational consumer culture. These colonizing cultivars, and the haute cuisine trends they embody, often displace indigenous food knowledge, techniques, and products already compromised by the penetration of processed foods. Through experiential pedagogical examples from Guatemala and Vermont, this paper explores the ways in which participatory, indigenous food and seed sovereignty curricula can help decolonize these newest kinds of hegemonic impositions and reaffirm traditional food systems.
I would like to express my deepest appreciation and gratitude to my dissertation committee: to my... more I would like to express my deepest appreciation and gratitude to my dissertation committee: to my co-chairs, Gregory Button and Tricia Redeker-Hepner for their continued patience, support, and encouragement, and for their essential guidance and critical feedback through the draft stages of the dissertation; to De Ann Pendry, who was always willing to listen to and comment on new ideas; to Damayanti Banarjee, whose graduate seminars in environmental sociology provided a forum for the initial explorations of many of the ideas that appear in this dissertation. I would also like to thank Jon Shefner of the sociology department. Without the community and fellowship provided by fellow graduate students I could not have made it through this process. I would especially like to thank Erin Eldridge, Gabriella Maldonado, and Amanda Reinke for their support, friendship, and feedback. I would also like to thank those undergraduate students whose enthusiasm and engagement helped tremendously in the formulation of parts of this dissertation. Thanks especially to Amanda
Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development, 2019
Based on research conducted with American Indian farmers and ranchers in southwestern Oklahoma, t... more Based on research conducted with American Indian farmers and ranchers in southwestern Oklahoma, this paper interrogates how agricultural resource bureaucracies differentially constrain or enable resilience to climate variability. We demonstrate that, while extreme weather events have been a persistent impediment to agriculture in the region, for American Indian farmers and ranchers such efforts have been equally hindered by a history of negative interaction with opaque and frequently indifferent systems of overlapping, yet disjunctive, bureaucracy. We are, thus, concerned with precisely how structural vulnerability and climate vulnerability are reproduced in tandem, and how such structural constraints have circumscribed nascent food sovereignty efforts. Drawing on our research into how farmers in southwest Oklahoma understand the interaction between the impacts — potential and/or experienced — of climate change and different relationships to agriculture and nature, we demonstrate how demoralization and social defeat emerge from the failures of local resource bureaucracies. Those agencies have, ironically, contributed to the vulnerability of the very population they have been established to serve. What we will show is that, caught between the opacity and bureaucratic posturing of two federal resource agencies, many American Indian landowners simply give up.
Drawing from a combination of archival and ethnographic evidence, this article examines historic ... more Drawing from a combination of archival and ethnographic evidence, this article examines historic and contemporary land tenure issues within a single county in southwestern Oklahoma. Specifi cally, we look at the way in which bureaucratic control has created a system that, while originally and ostensible intended to protect the " rights " of American Indian landowners, in fact functions to restrict, undermine, and redirect " access " to those lands, oft en to the economic benefi t of non-Indian farmers and ranchers. We consider how the leasing system administered by the Anadarko Agency of the Bureau of Indian Aff airs generates a " bundle of powers " that creates profound barriers to American Indian access to their own property. At work in the BIA's bundle of powers over access to this land are a host of actors and institutions, both contemporary and historic, that have worked together to shape the social relations that give rise to the current alienation from and dispossession of Oklahoma's Native-owned lands from their intended benefi ciaries. Indeed, this tenuous situation is refl ective of complexities attending continual retrenchments and revisions of federal Indian land policy— periodic reassertions of bureaucratic authority and control that reposition actors in perennially shift ing sociolegal relationalities. We seek if not to disentangle these relationships, then to at least render them visible and thus open to debate and intervention.
Based on ten months of mixed ethnographic and archival research, this study is concerned with way... more Based on ten months of mixed ethnographic and archival research, this study is concerned with ways in which contemporary agro-environmental subjectivities and practices in a southwestern Oklahoma farming community are rooted in the massive state-level interventions of the New Deal era and their successors. We are likewise concerned with how those interventions have become interdigitated with moral discourses and community ethics, as simultaneous expressions of both farmers' identities and the systems of power in which they practice farming. Through historic and ethnographic evidence, we demonstrate the ways in which the localization of American agricultural conservation and the attendant, edificatory role of resource bureaucracies have shaped contemporary practices and ideologies of natural resource stewardship among conventional farmers and ranchers.
Sustainability has become a keyword in popular discourses in the age of the celebrity chef. As s... more Sustainability has become a keyword in popular discourses in the age of the celebrity chef. As such, chefs and other actors working in the visible spaces and venues of a shared U.S. public culinary culture have become powerful spokespersons for sustainable food production, consumption, and localization. Unlike catastrophist discourses of environmentalisms’ of the past, however, this new discourse is often framed in terms of a politics of pleasure that redefines deliberate and considered hedonism as a kind of transformative eco-culinary engagement. In self-assigned missionary roles, chefs and other prepared food producers are often engaging in very deliberate pedagogical projects that link sensuality and sustainability. Likewise, and equally important to these efforts, is the centrality of regard—that is, attempts among chefs to re-embed exchange relations between producers and consumers, often serving as the critical interlocutors in such reassertions. This article is an exploration of how such processes have played out in the public culinary context of Knoxville, Tennessee and vicinity. As a mid-size city in the heart of southern Appalachia’s Ridge and Valley sub-region, Knoxville is undergoing a familiar process of urban revitalization that includes a robust food service sector. Amid shifting demographics and media flows bringing more cosmopolitan influences to the region, a range of actors have grounded these in a regionally specific food and farming heritage in order to reconnect consumers and producers, and cultivate a more sustainable and mutualistic local food system.
Local food movements are burgeoning in contemporary urban North America. While oriented toward th... more Local food movements are burgeoning in contemporary urban North America. While oriented toward the recovery and reassertion of the “local,” such movements are also embedded in the structures of economic globalization. This paper is an ethnographic and theoretical exploration of ways in which a particular group of urban local food movement actors assert the local—and the trans-local—through the symbolic capital of nostalgia and remembrance. Indeed, the sentimental mode of production that characterizes the “new old-fashioned-ism” of much local food movement activity depends fundamentally on tropes of collective and individual food memory in establishing its claims to moral authority.
While American bison were hunted to near-extinction in the last decades of the nineteenth century... more While American bison were hunted to near-extinction in the last decades of the nineteenth century, populations of the recently designated "national mammal" of the U.S. have recovered sufficiently to support a thriving contemporary ranching and food retail sector. This industry is supporting tribal initiatives driving both dietary revitalization and economic recovery, while also being subject to more conventional neoliberal market processes actively transforming bison products into elite culinary specialties endowed with great symbolic "staging value." Drawing on examples from Oklahoma, this paper discusses the cultural politics of these "interlaced trails," and the implications for tribal food sovereignty, sustainability, and health concerns.