Crisis, Disruption, and Renewal: Diverse Approaches to Understanding How Communities Navigate Loss and Disconnection

At the time we are writing this, the world is focused on fighting an unprecedented global pandemic following the spread of COVID-19. Many have been advised to work from home, and “social distancing” policies prohibit face-to-face interactions or social gatherings of more than ten. The articles in this issue reflect the creative and collaborative ways that anthropologists, including archaeologists, study how people experience and adapt to rapid or gradual ecological and social change in specific community contexts. As we grapple personally and intellectually with how to navigate the connections and disconnections created by COVID-19, these articles remind us of the many analytical tools that we have for researching processes of crisis, disruption, and renewal. The authors help us understand how communities process, grieve, remember, and work collaboratively toward renewal after experiencing different types of loss of environmental quality, livelihood, access to familiar foods, and mobility across borders. They remind us to take time to understand the deeply emotional, as well as the political and economic, processes at work in times of crisis and inspire us to continue working together (despite social distancing) to document the ways that communities navigate disruption.

In Farming the Great Sage Plain: Experimental Agroarchaeology and the Basketmaker III Soil Record, Cynthia M. Fadem and Shanna R. Diederichs draw on the results of two research projects undertaken by the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center to investigate patterns of soil development in the semiarid Mesa Verde region. This research allows them to explore the effects of dryland agricultural practices used by Ancestral Pueblo peoples on pedogenesis (the process of soil formation) and soil fertility. These findings are important for understanding Ancestral Pueblo farming practices and lifeways and for mitigating the effects of climate change and desertification in this region today. Fadem and Diederichs also demonstrate the value of collaborative research in archaeology; at Crow Canyon, archaeologists work alongside members of the Hopi tribe as they experiment with traditional farming techniques.

Suzanne Kent and Keri Vacanti Brondo explore the importance of documenting how communities identify and ritualize emotional experiences of environmental loss in “Years Ago the Crabs Was so Plenty”: Anthropology's Role in Ecological Grieving and Conservation Work. They tease out the many ways that ecological grieving is central to our experiences in the Anthropocene and how it can create spaces for hope and regeneration. Working collaboratively with conservationists based in Honduras, Kent and Brondo conducted interviews with people living on the island of Utila. They examine these particular narratives of ecological loss and call on anthropologists to pay closer attention to the emotional dynamics of environmental change.

Consumption, especially of food, is a key form of political engagement, and reliable food provisioning is inextricably linked with political legitimacy. In Geopolitics, Food Security, and Imaginings of the State in Qatar’s Desert Landscape, Kristin V. Monroe describes the ways that food and politics became intertwined after several of Qatar’s trade partners in the Gulf region severed diplomatic ties and imposed a blockade on the desert nation in 2017. Drawing on participant observation and her experiences as an expatriate living and teaching in Qatar at the time, Monroe explains how the state responded to this crisis by investing heavily in greenhouse vegetable cultivation and indoor cattle rearing and encouraging a “buy local” consumer culture.

In keeping with the depth of community-based research using a multi-method or grounded approach, the two papers from the US South highlight why and how communities give up certain vocations or adopt new market-based water quality improvement options.

In Tales of Landings and Legacies: African Americans in Georgia’s Coastal Fisheries, Dionne Hoskins-Brown sheds light on the little-known conditions under which post-Civil War African American vocational fishing practices declined. Hoskins-Brown triangulates data from multiple rich sources, namely oral histories, Savannah city records, review of historical, individual, archived print material, and annual landings data from the NOAA Fisheries Office of Science and Technology (NOAA OST). She paints a complex picture of the fisheries decline, complicating existing narratives and findings. The history and findings in this paper are especially relevant since racial demographics for fishermen are not collected or reported by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources.

Caela O’Connell and Krista Billingsley underscore circumstances under which community dynamics between stakeholders and stakeholder knowledge support privatized Water Quality Trading (WQT) efforts in A Place at the Well: The Imperative for Farmer Inclusion in Water Quality Policy Design. Their specific focus is in watershed areas of eastern and central Tennessee. Their aim in this collaborative approach is to engage individuals and groups who are working on setting up and revising water quality trading markets and policies across the US. Their nuanced findings have the potential to engender better inclusion of stakeholders in the design phase of WQT policy implementation. Moreover, such inclusion could yield more equitable trading and market parameters for farmers, who are often undervalued and taken for granted in these (mostly failing) markets.

Also in this issue, Susan Andreatta reviews geographer Julie Guthman’s Wilted: Pathogens, Chemicals and the Fragile Future of the Strawberry Industry, which explores the political economy of strawberry production in California. Andreatta highlights the major theoretical contributions of the book and draws attention to additional resources that expand on Guthman’s relatively thin analysis of labor conditions in this industry.

James P. Verinis also reviews anthropologist Teresa Mares’ Life on the Other Border: Farmworkers and Food Justice in Vermont. The book examines the lived experiences of Latinx workers in Vermont’s dairy industry. Verinis analyzes the book’s significant contributions to anthropological theory on borders and bordering and praises the ways that the ethnographic material makes clear the unexpected forms of intersubjectivity and intimacy that develop between immigrant laborers, food movement activists, and Vermont residents.