Sociology 861, Fall 1997
Lawrence BuschTuesdays, 1:50-4:40 PM Room C202 Wells Hall
Telephone: 355-3396Email: Buschll@pilot.msu.edu
http://pilot.msu.edu/user/buschll/
About the Course:
The course will provide a survey of food and agriculture from farm to factory to family dinner table. Among the topics to be examined will be: women in agriculture, part-time farming in industrial nations, subsistence and cash crop farming in developing nations, farm labor, commodity systems, the biodiversity debate, the transformation of food processing from kitchen to factory to fast food establishment, the global distribution system, the restructuring of the diet, the role of research in the transformation process, and the environmental and social consequences of globalization. The "conceptual glue holding the course together will be a concern for how agricultural grades and standards shape both human and nonhuman actors. This is a seminar open to students from various fields concerned with agriculture and food systems.
Course Objectives
1. To provide students with an opportunity for hands-on collaborative research on issues of importance to an understanding of the contemporary agri-food system. The emphasis in the course will be on collaborative and cooperative learning. (To find out more about why there is an emphasis on cooperative and collaborative learning, click here.)
2. To clarify the links between food, agriculture and environment, both conceptually and in practice.
3. To develop research skills that permit cross-disciplinary work in agriculture and related fields.
4. To examine the role of grades and standards in producing both commodities and forms of social life.
Some Preliminary Thoughts on Grades and Standards
Conventional wisdom would have it that grades and standards are:
What we intend to do in this course is to challenge each of these assumptions, by arguing and producing empirical data to support the following hypotheses:
1. Grades and standards shape the world around us. They are ubiquitous. They are inescapable and exist in some form or another in all societies at all places and at all times. Even in non- or pre-capitalist societies, people make distinctions among things, ranking them as good or bad, better or worse, for this or that use.
2. Grades and standards also shape us. They shape our behavior as we find that we must conform to them in order to enter the market as well as other places of social interaction. For example, grades for grains require that farmers who wish to sell their grain adhere to certain production practices. Moreover, the very definition of what constitutes a good farmer is wrapped up in what are considered to be good as defined by the standard.
3. While grades and standards for technical artifacts are often complex and arcane, any normal individual is capable of understanding them. The approach that I recommend is to think of them as an ethnographer might. In visiting a foreign society, it is necessary to learn the language and customs of the people in order to ask intelligent questions and to develop a report about them. The same applies to the technoscientific communities that develop, administer, modify and maintain grades and standards. They have a language--in which most of the words are actually plain-old ordinary everyday English (at least in this country)--that you must learn, as well as a set of customs (or practices) in which they engage. Once those are understood, it is relatively easy to ask intelligent questions.
4. While there is little doubt that uniform grades and standards reduce transaction costs, they also perform a much more important service: They define what the market is, thereby making economic analysis possible. For example, in many markets in less developed nations, sellers sell unstandardized products in unstandardized containers using unstandardized pricing. In those circumstances, the naive economist might well calculate the price (e.g., of rice), but it will not reflect any real commodity for sale. Instead, it will merely be an average across numerous singularities.
5. Grades and standards serve to divide social goods such as wealth, power, status, prestige, and income. For example, grades that are too stringent will remove some players from the market entirely. Grades that are too lax will permit the sale of shoddy goods to unsuspecting buyers.
In short, grades and standards are a crucial--if often overlooked--aspect of how we put the world (or rather worlds) of justice together. They have enormous import for social relations. Indeed, they are a form of social relations.
Requirements:
Students will be expected to:
1. Keep up with the readings. Some weeks require more reading than others, so read ahead!
2. Participate in class. Participation in the seminar will provide the basis for 30% of your course grade. Each student will be expected to participate in the discussion of each week's readings. Students will be expected to come to each class with a set of three or four questions prepared that probe the readings for that class. Selected questions will be used to stimulate discussion. The questions will be collected at the end of each class, but will not be graded. Grading here will be individual.
3. Participate in a group research project on grades and standards. Students will be divided into groups of 2-3 persons to develop research projects on grades and standards. Details of the project format and design will be discussed in class. The paper resulting from the group project will provide the basis of 40% of your grade. Note that the grade will be a group grade.
4. Participate in the construction of a web page on grades and standards. Each student will be expected to identify, classify and evaluate (in the form of short summaries) web pages relevant to the study of agricultural grades and standards. Some of this will involve group cooperation as well as individual efforts. A preliminary site list has been posted on my homepage(address above). This will provide the basis for 30% of your grade. Although it will include group collaboration, the grade will be individual.
Required Texts:
(Required texts are available at all area bookstores. The Course Pack which contains all the readings except as noted below will be available just before the beginning of the semester at Budget Print Center, 972 Trowbridge Road, 351-5060. It is at the west end of the shopping center.)
Beck, Ulrich. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage.
Bonanno, Alessandro et al. 1994. From Columbus to ConAgra: The Globalization of Agriculture and Food. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press.
Busch, Lawrence et al. 1995. Making Nature, Shaping Culture: Plant Biodiversity in Global Context. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Goodman, David and Michael Redclift. 1991. Refashioning Nature: Food, Ecology, and Culture.London: Routledge.
Levenstein, 1988. Revolution at the Table. New York: Oxford University Press.
Lewontin, Richard. 1992. Biology as Ideology. New York: Harper.
Thompson, Paul. 1995. The Spirit of the Soil. Agriculture and Environmental Ethics. New York: Routledge.
Other reading will be in a course pack.
Course Outline and Reading List
I. August 26. Introduction: Why food, agriculture, and environment are no longer separate topics.
Students to introduce themselves, discussion of syllabus, brief lecture on food, agriculture and the environment.
II. September 2. Risks, Science and Modernity
Beck, Ulrich. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity.
III. September 9 Making Grades and Standards I
Appadurai, A. 1986. Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value. In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Social Perspective. Pp. 3-63 in A. Appadurai, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.
Busch, L. "The Moral Economy of Grades and Standards." Invited paper presented at a conference on Agrarian Questions, Wageningen, Netherlands, May, 1995.
Pinch, Trevor. 1993. Testing--one, two, three ... testing: Toward a sociology of testing. Science, Technology, and Human Values 18 (Winter): 25-41.
IV. September 16. Making Grades and Standards II
Boisard, P. 1991. The Future of a Tradition: Two Ways of Making Camembert, the Foremost Cheese of France. Food and Foodways 4, 3-4:173-207.
Busch, L. and K. Tanaka. 1996. "Rites of Passage: Constructing Quality in a Commodity Subsector." Science, Technology and Human Values. 21(1): 3-27.
O'Connell, Joseph. 1993. The creation of universality by the circulation of particulars. Social Studies of Science 23(February): 129-173.
V. September 23. Science and Society
Lewontin, Richard. 1992. Biology as Ideology
VI. September 30. Food and Agriculture in Historical Perspective.
Braudel, Fernand. 1967. Capitalism and Material Life, 1400-1800.New York: Harper and Row, Chapter 2, " Daily Bread" and Chapter 3, "Superfluity and Sufficiency: Food and Drink." (On reserve at Main Library)
Busch, L. 1991. "Manufacturing Plants: Notes on the Culture of Nature and the Nature of Culture," International Journal of Sociology of Agriculture and Food. I:105-115.
Rindos, David. 1980. "Symbiosis, Instability, Spread of Agriculture: A New Model," Current Anthropology 21(December):751-765.
VII. October 7. The Mechanization of Agriculture and Food
Banaji, Jarius. 1980. "Summary of Selected Parts of Kautsky's The Agrarian Question." Pp. 39-82 in Frederick H. Buttel and Howard Newby, eds. The Rural Sociology of the Advanced Societies. Montclair, NJ: Allanheld, Osmun.
Giedion, Siegfried. 1975. Mechanization Takes Command. New York: W.W. Norton, pp. 130-256. (On reserve at Main Library)
VIII. October 14. Class, ethnicity, gender, and status: The many faces of agriculture.
Friedland, William H. 1991. "Women and Agriculture in the United States." Pp. 315-338 in Friedland, William H. et al., Towards a New Political Economy of Agriculture. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Raynolds, Laura. 1991. "Women and Agriculture in the Third World: A Review and a Critique." Pp. 339-364 in Friedland, William H. et al., Towards a New Political Economy of Agriculture. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Flora, Cornelia Butler. 1990. "Rural Peoples in a Global Economy," Rural Sociology. 55(Spring):157-177.
Blumberg, Rae Lesser. 1989. Making the Case for the Gender Variable: Women and the Wealth and Well-Being of Nations. Washington, DC: Office of Women and Development, Agency for International Development, pp. xv-xix.
IX. October 21. Agriculture and Environment I
Goodman, David and Michael Redclift. 1991. Refashioning Nature: Food, Ecology, and Culture.London: Routledge.
X. October 28. Agriculture and Environment II: Environmental Problems and Indigenous Knowledge
Bird, Elizabeth. 1987. "The Social Construction of Nature: Theoretical Approaches to the History of Environmental Problems," Environmental History 11(4): 255-64.
Biggelaar, Christoffel den. 1991. "Farming Systems Development: Synthesizing Indigenous and Scientific Knowledge Systems," Agriculture and Human Values. 7(1-2): 25-36.
Cashman, Kristen. 1991. "Systems of Knowledge as Systems of Domination: The Limitations of Established Meaning," Agriculture and Human Values. 7(1-2): 49-58.
XI. November 4. Agriculture and Environment III: The Biodiversity Debate
Busch, Lawrence et al. 1995. Making Nature, Shaping Culture: Plant Biodiversity in Global Context.
XII. November 11. Restructuring the food system I
Murcott, Anne. 1988. "Sociological and Social Anthropological Approaches to Food and Eating," World Review of Nutrition and Dietetics. 55: 1-40.
Harris, Marvin. 1987. "Foodways: Historical Overview and Theoretical Prolegomenon." Pp. 57-90 Marvin Harris and Eric B. Ross, eds. Food and Evolution: Toward a Theory of Human Food Habits. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Heffernan, William D. 1984. "Constraints in the U.S. Poultry Industry," Annual Review of Rural Sociology and Development 1: 237-60.
XIII. November 18. Restructuring the food system II
Levenstein, 1988. Revolution at the Table. New York: Oxford University Press.
XIV. November 25. Eat your heart out!
Lewis, Lloyd and Claire Cronier. 1989. "Dietary Guidelines: Implications for Agriculture." Pp. 268-283 in K. K. Carroll, ed., Diet, Nutrition, and Health. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press.
Huxsoll, Charles C. and Harold R. Bolin. 1989. "Processing and Distribution Alternatives for Minimally Processed Fruits and Vegetables," Food Technology 43(February): 124-28.
Friedmann, Harriet. 1990. "Family Wheat Farms and Third World Diets: A Paradoxical Relationship Between Unwaged and Waged Labor." Pp. 193-213 in Jane L. Collins and Martha Gimenez, eds. Work Without Wages. Albany: SUNY Press.
Hoban, Thomas J. and Patricia A. Kendall. 1992. Consumer Attitudes About the Use of Biotechnology in Agriculture and Food Production. Raleigh: North Carolina State University.
XV. December 2. The Moral Imperative: Reintegrating food, agriculture, and the environment.
Thompson, Paul. 1995. The Spirit of the Soil. Agriculture and Environmental Ethics.
