In, Of, and For the City: Acknowledging the 2022 Anthony Leeds Prize in Urban Anthropology

For as long as I have been writing anthropology, Anthony Leeds Prize honorees have been among my compass points. When A Mass Conspiracy to Feed People was just a sketch in my grad school notebooks, they helped me imagine the “field” for an ethnography of the crabgrass-like phenomenon that is Food Not Bombs (FNB), a transnational web of anarchist soup kitchens that recover discarded food (via donation or dumpster), prepare it safely, and distribute it publicly, mostly to people experiencing homelessness and hunger. For over forty years, without any formal structure or budget, the movement has fed millions of people in hundreds of cities on every continent except Antarctica. In the process, it illustrates and resists the inequities of the neoliberal city. Comprising a motley assemblage of punks, vagrants, students, migrants, hackers, Quakers, and other radicals, FNB was described to me by one collaborator as “a mass conspiracy—to feed people!”

But how to study such a thing?

Leeds recipients have consistently charted such novel anthropological objects and territories, laying groundwork for the global, transurban mode of ethnography to which A Mass Conspiracy aspires. As exemplars of an anthropology in, of, and for the city, they have advanced innovations of scale and epistemology in the very parameters of “the field” and rearticulated our ethical and methodological commitments to subjects in, and of, urban space. They have mobilised urban insights and imperatives in ways that resonate beyond any specific city or subdiscipline. I have turned to many of them repeatedly, and passed their work on to students who might benefit from the same sense of scope and engagement that has so inspired me.

So imagine the honour, and incredulity, of finding my work on this list. If the book has been passed this particular baton, it is because it aims to keep some of the promises of the canon of the Leeds Prize.

The most important of those has been a commitment to an urban anthropology that is also a commitment to communities, relationships, and issues native to my own backyard. Practitioners of such an anthropology seek to bring ethnographic tools to bear on the near and the familiar, to mobilise their findings in situ, in those spaces where we are already entangled. The book emerges from at least fifteen years of connection to the cities and communities in question. From the first words I typed on a blank page, I pictured the book one day nestled on the shelves of my favourite anarchist bookstore in Seattle, Left Bank Books. I imagined it catching the eye of eager activists not unlike myself at twenty-three, when I first read about FNB—for which I credit ethnographer Jeff Ferrel's 2001 Tearing Down the Streets: Adventures in Urban Anarchy (so I was particularly moved when he wrote comments for my back cover!). I am proud to say that when A Mass Conspiracy was launched, I held the event at Left Bank. Friends and FNB collaborators from around the world joined in person and online, and even read excerpts of their own contributions.

In contradistinction to any concept of the field as a distant antipode, a font of alterity to be harvested and translated, Leeds Prize recipients have often articulated an immanent field in which they already live, love, and work—and where the knowledge they create may circulate. It was one of them, my supervisor Danny Hoffman, who first suggested I write about FNB. “I can't do that, can I?” I asked him. “That's my own life!” (I had been volunteering with FNB for a year and a half.) But, he asked, didn't I think it was important? Didn't I think it was theoretically interesting? And didn't I think others should know about it? Of course, he was right. We can write about our own communities. Perhaps we must.

I spent the next several years integrating activism and participant observation in ways that were sometimes paradoxical, sometimes trying, but enriching of my ethnographic and political methods alike. At times, my research amounted to arguing with police about food-sharing restrictions, or dumpster diving when donations fell short. At other moments, my “informants” were homeless friends and FNB collaborators who lived on my couch, or stored their valuables with me while they slept under overpasses or awnings. Rather than make these friendships into an object of research, I reasoned that our collaborations amounted to a joint ethnographic exploration of the urban economy itself. We were, all of us, connecting the dots between waste, commerce, police repression, urban space, and our own resistance. For me, this represented an anthropology of, with, and for social movements, inspired by the late Jeff Juris' “militant ethnography” (2007). Influenced by Nancy Scheper-Hughes, he reasoned that ethnographic insight sometimes requires us to put our hearts, minds, and bodies on the line alongside our fellow political agitators.

This commitment carried into the writing: I shared drafts with as many FNB collaborators as I could. One told me bluntly he couldn't imagine any of his peers reading an “academic treatise” on FNB, and I knew he had a point. So I set out to prove him wrong, clinging to a faith that we do not face an either-or choice between writing for local interlocutors, fellow anthropologists, or other publics. I gave painstaking attention to the prose, hoping to knit together the theoretical, political, ethnographic, and vernacular registers of its various intended audiences into a unified cadence and idiom. I believe it paid off, and I have been deeply grateful that the book has, in fact, found its way into activist bookstores and reading groups in two hemispheres. People I've never met, in FNB chapters I've never visited, have read it together and reached out to me to ask how they can get a copy. (Hint: it never hurts to ask the author.) Among activists, academics, students, and a larger public alike, there is a common appetite for ethnographic insight.

To enable this, one lesson I drew from my favourite Leeds titles is that a book's representational strategies should extend its ethnographic commitments. I envisioned a text FNB collaborators and other radicals might pick up, and whose pages they would be moved to turn. This manifested in a structure and aesthetic style that echoed the DIY aesthetics and collages of zines, pamphlets, and flyers from the punk and anarchist worlds in which FNB is embedded. For this, I owe thanks to my editor, Gisela Fosado, and Duke University Press, who were supportive enough to allow me the hubris of a three-page design brief requesting a melange of marginalia, ethnographic excursuses, clashing typefaces, and more photos than usual. In particular, I credit Duke's designer, Aimee Harrison, with making it actually work in ways I couldn't have envisioned.

These were not just aesthetic choices. They speak to FNB's messy, pluralist organising logics and material practices, built on excesses and castoffs. The book's margins, for example, are littered with oral history, in tension with the main body of the text; readers who mistrust an academic narrative can read for other voices and vernaculars. I hope the effect has been to capture something of the decentralization and anarchic poly-vocality of the movement itself, and the heterogeneous urban landscapes in which it is embedded.

Yet the book is not a zine or pamphlet: it is an ethnography. It puts anthropological tools to work in three key ways, inspired by the lessons of urban anthropology and Leeds Prize winners in particular.

First, it valorises the ethnographic optics of urban peripheries. It is a book about surplus, scarcity, and remainders. It asks what we can learn about our social, political, and economic structures from those people and things they abandon. It begins with FNB's empirical insight: as useful surpluses are discarded—billions of pounds of edible food wasted annually by American retailers, millions of homes shuttered and vacant across the country—while millions of people experience food and housing insecurity, capitalism manufactures scarcity. Like my FNB collaborators, who approach the urban landscape of grocers, markets, and dumpsters across the city as a source of political-economic insight, the book traces the circulation of these abandoned surpluses. It explores the social infrastructures, from dumpsters to homeless shelters, that enclave waste and abandonment in select locales, away from those public spaces constitutive of the market.

In this way, the book brings the lessons of the city into dialogue with economic anthropology, value theory, and critiques of capitalism, locating the co-production of value and obsolescence at the center of capital accumulation. It identifies wasted commercial surpluses—with use value but obsolete exchange value—as a previously unnamed economic form, “abject capital.” Not unlike cosmic dark matter, abject capital is both ubiquitous and typically invisible, yet accounts for the motion of more visible phenomena. Like fixed capital, it is expended rather than sold in the production and realization of surplus value, yet its chief function is to remain off the market, often locked away in dumpsters as a kind of social infrastructure that manufactures scarcity and inflates prices.

The book describes the social afterlives of this abject capital in several cities, particularly as manifested by FNB's public meals. Unlike other emergency meal programs, which subsist on donations of the same post-capitalist surpluses but segregate them out of sight in church basements and under freeways, FNB distributes food in broad daylight, in public parks and squares, often in defiance of laws that prohibit public feeding—a thinly veiled refusal of public space and visibility to those abandoned populations, (surplus to capitalism's requirements, in a sense) who are the other half of the equation for manufactured scarcity. This often attracts state intervention, leading to periods of conflict, fines, or arrests. Most dramatically, the city of San Francisco arrested over 1,000 FNB volunteers between 1988 and 1996; smaller such conflicts occur regularly in cities across the world. Such intervention, at these junctures where abject surpluses threaten to erupt back into the public sphere, illustrate the role of municipal state apparatuses in capital accumulation in a way that is simultaneously urban and global.

The book's second ethnographic lesson is therefore to approach the city as a cipher and conduit for global forces, and vice versa. It records FNB's experience in four cities, Seattle, San Francisco, New York, and Melbourne, tracing parallels between the production of waste and the politics of public space. It identifies these as constitutive elements of what Saskia Sassen called the “global city” (2001), an emergent, globalized mode of urbanism towards which many major metropolises evolve in concert, worldwide. These cities share paradigms of capital accumulation that manufacture scarcity, surplus, and waste in parallel ways, reflected in the inequities and injustices described above. The global proliferation of FNB over four decades is therefore an index for neoliberal and post-Fordist restructuring of cities and global economies during the same period.

With this in mind, the book's third lesson is to seek new political possibilities in the ontological ground of everyday life in the city. It relies on ethnography's knack for finding order in the maelstrom of on-the-ground practices—illegible from the heights of dominant epistemologies and institutions, with their rationalised optics. As in earlier eras of radical foment, A Mass Conspiracy argues that a dominant political and economic orders' abandoned surpluses—people, places, and things alike—recombine in radical sociopolitical afterlives. The book offers FNB as a case study, a manifold of remainders, from its wasted food and squatted or low-rent homes to the spectrum of squatters, punks, students, migrants, unhoused collaborators, and other differently displaced survivors of capitalism, who are its constituents. Their alienation from market sociality frees them to circulate via non-market spaces and practices of generosity, abundance, and community provisioning. The book traces their networks, spaces, and practices across several cities. Over time, they amount to a form of nonviolent, underground, slow insurrection (from which erupt more acute, visible insurrectionary moments like Occupy Wall Street).

As the specter of illiberal conspiracies grows in power and volume, reflecting the crises that characterize the liberal order in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, unlikely, heterogenous confederacies like FNB represent not only a cipher for political and economic crisis—indexing the waste and deprivations of our increasingly polarised cities—but a model for a positive, even prefigurative, illiberalism: a rejoinder to the far-right populisms that crowd our political horizons. Such resistance and grassroots forms of organization, simultaneously global and urban, peripheral and publicly resonant, hold important lessons in, of, and for the future of our cities. These are the lessons that FNB has taught me, and the lessons that I hope the book carries further afield.