Local Democracy: Sustaining Healthy Community through Ethical, Sustainable Food Systems

Abstract

Actor-networks and political economy are not dualistic opposites: A critical commentary on the new agrifood studies Alan RJI{!y-Michigan S tate University Whether derived from science or consumption studies, the sociology of agrifood systems is increasingly emphasizing material and consumer agency. The majority of this work represents itself as a counter and corrective to a purported hegemonic structuralism within the sociology or political economy of agriculture. However, political economy is a wideranging field, much of it relational in a manner that presupposes an intimate connection between consumption and production (whether in the form of productive consumption or consumption as reproduction). Unfortunately, rather than explore the production of new and historical forms of consumer agencies (or material actancy) the majority of the new scholarship brackets traditionally political economic question as to 1) the material and ideological conditions that constrain prior (production-oriented) forms of politics and enable new (consumption-oriented) ones, and 2) the uneven spatial, social and ecological distribution of these new agencies. In the context of organic, anti-BST, or anti-G~,JO consumer purchasing patterns and advocacy movements neither 1) the relations that tie retail oligopolies and consumer politics together nor 2) those relations that connect "food deserts" in rural areas and inner city areas to the market conditions that make retailers responsive to the desires and politics of high end fresh fruit, vegetable and meat consumers are addressed. Rather than the seamless actor-networks of Latour, this paper stresses the differential agencies and coalitions of Haraway's situated knowledges as a means of integrating political economic and post -structural theories of agrifood systems.