Seeking: what grows?
An invitation to shape how this newsletter develops, and a peek into the fieldnotes
Hello friends,
Since I’ve begun writing this, I’ve wanted to bring this journey of finding agroecological futures in Southeast Asia to life.
A big reason to write this newsletter has been to share interesting tidbits, and longer thoughts from the research.
But I also want to make things that are relevant to folks reading it, since we are making the world together.
So I am looking for some advice!
I don’t do big networks very well; and I know some of you do!
I’d like to continue creating spaces to question and think differently about our shared food systems.
Most of all, I’d like to know what sort of things would you like to see this newsletter cover?
And, what are good platforms to publish on?
Continuing with Substack (do you like the newsletter format?)
Moving to Medium (But non-members can only read 3 free stories a month)
Github (I’m learning this! To put up curricula, materials, tools, for artists, educators, facilitators): Would this be useful for any of you?
People have said hearing examples of regenerative or indigenous practices that people are returning to, creating, or continuing are a big plus.
What else would you like to hear?
I mean, one reason I write is just to let my own creative juices flow somewhere. I need to spill over onto a page somewhere and academic articles take too long; and LinkedIn sure isn’t that space.
I think of Crafting and Making as a co-creative process; making brings joy and forward momentum. I just keep hitting a wall of self-doubt - all my notes and texts are sitting on my laptop.
But Making is occurring around me, amongst friends with the knowledge and resources to find this valuable—the generation of people in the workforce with the knowledge but no demonstrated skills yet developed to change things in-context. There’s a nice article on this I’m meaning to read in Cultural Anthropology: “Just Visiting: Curious Ethnography, Intentional Design, and Collaborative Art”.
Is such Making useful to share?
One reason I’m asking is this: Who’s reading?
Is there a point to challenge a changing world by working with others who hold the same class privilege I do—the specific rising expert class that is critical, aware, who has the ability to support, influence or defy the actual “rule of experts”?
I guess those who read this newsletter also struggle, like I do, with awareness of what this “rule of experts” does. There will be some who have some family wealth and resources—in real assets, not only future-realized investments—to purchase land or make 20 year decisions with their family. And some who don’t have any family wealth at all and seek to change class relations through spears or peace.
Ultimately, capital comes in many forms, and close-knit decision-making, a (chosen) family support system, and close bonds bring us further than anything else. And each of us can contribute in some way: shaping the knowledge system in which we come to know things.
If I continue writing, I’d like to write honestly, for everyone working in this space of looking at the technical, regulatory, practice, and daily living part of a transition towards a more fair, ecologically- and socially-just world.
Please let me know what you think!
Lastly (I promise this is the last question), are things like “notes from the desk” interesting or useful? Which of these do you find more interesting - none or one or both?
Like This?
1) Running notes from calls and brain-farts:
Explorer Land is good for stories, nuance, relational weaving.
The agricultural risk dilemma: Farmers won't take the risk of change; investors can't take the risk of non-revenue within financial terms. James Scott says something about justice and risk in the moral economy of the peasant. Something I’d like to bring into a discussion on justice and law.
Or This?
2) A peak into the running fieldnotes: (Justice and law)
I am shuttling between theory and concrete detailed observations to narrow down a set of questions: "It is the movement between them and their articulation that produces epiphanies and analytical knowledge. Theoretical questions help to deduce critical areas of inquiry, and detailed field research of an inductive nature allows us to investigate concrete dynamics." (Lund, 2014, 231)
One question I pose in this work, is one of Derrida's on his meditation on deconstruction, the force of law, and the possibility of justice. In which he ponders this relationship between law and justice, through deconstruction--through investigating the authority of language.
Derrida's discussion of law and justice is abstract, but never far from the everyday realities we are faced with today. The tension between complete submission and disagreement to the cité appears every night as I sit with my host. Thailand is accepting it all, he says often. You must understand, Ying, he says, Thailand has to produce food for the world; and its land is wet. People with money can buy land, but most people don't. "You have a lot of land though", I say to him. It's all rented, he says. And people have kids to raise, grandkids to send to school. Another night he talks about Thaksin who was exiled from Thailand on charges of corruption: "he bought land with government money", my host says. Someone with so much money, eventually he couldn't tell the difference between what he needed and what he wanted. He later makes comparisons with what I show him (of a friend who used a hand tool to aerate soil, on a project in Malaysia) -- we can't do that here, it's dry land there in Malaysia; really wet land here in Thailand -- to make sense of the situation he faces. There are so many ways to read a situation for disadvantage to oneself.
These situations he faces are also situations he has shaped himself, alongside the other actors who also shape Thai national reality (TV). But it becomes hard to know whose action begins and ends in an effect, in many ways as Derrida too notes, there are no simple symptoms or simple causes. If any change is sought at all, it might be to change things not through "calculated, deliberate and strategically controlled intervention, but [through] maximum intensification of a transformation in progress, in the name of neither a simple symptom nor a simple cause (other categories are required here)" (9). Thailand is not at all unique in this regard. News from around the world arrives and appears on Thai PBS news: 35 Myanmar people being shot at for leaving their houses and the new UN ambassador releasing a statement in English condemning the action; material support for the refugees; alongside Thai politicians and the Princess being paraded on TV for the mass viewing public. One night we watch Thai PBS news on the television. It is running a news clip on politicians who "chai yaa" -- taking the vaccines. A lot of showing off, showing up, for vaccines. Then there is a news clip on new orders being set in place given the new omicron wave set to hit--who knows, Thailand, the world. News that Chiang Mai was becoming a hotspot. You must be careful, my hosts say to me. It appears that Thailand is moving towards "community isolation" facilities (they use the English word for this, even on the news). On the screen a room of about 12 beds appears, spaced about 1.5m apart from each other. No one wants to be in there, my hosts say. Everyone has to go? I ask, incredulous. Why aren't they kept separately? It's just this way, they say. If you test positive you have to be there for 14 days.
I find out later, reading the news again in English, that community isolation will take place in Bangkok, and is being considered because omicron is expected to be less lethal, with milder symptoms. (Addition: But that doesn't change the fact that a little over 1000km? south of Thailand, 12 beds in a room fuelled a deep surge of anger and support for the migrant workers' rights movement in Singapore, when COVID-19 numbers skyrocketed in Singapore because the migrant dorms, with 12 men in a room, imploded with infections and the Ministry of Manpower scrambled to deal with what they could have foreseen coming.
This case of COVID response and isolation corresponds, however, to a larger sense of deterrence, which is also an enforcement of law. Derrida notes that law must be enforceable to be law, even if not all laws are enforced: "there is no law without enforceability, and no applicability or enforceability of the law without force, whether this force be direct or indirect, physical or symbolic, exterior or interior, brutal or subtly discursive and hermeneutic, coercive or regulative, and so forth" (6)
From this southernmost sub-district of Ayutthaya, just 1 hour's drive from Bangkok on a straight highway up north, Bangkok is near but also far: a spatial elsewhere constructed through television, farming inputs, word of mouth. Not everyone who lives spatially close to a capital centre is equally well-travelled, and not everyone who lives spatially distant is less travelled. People choose of their own freedom and submission the limits of their spatial and geographical experience. My hosts keep to their family and themselves, but they are no less concerned about justice. They may treat law as laughable political codifications and constructions, but they hold a sense of justice that tries to weave through the acceptance of laws, to find a bearable way to live.
So then, what complexities of justice can serve people making sense of their own lives, and help people find common ground across class differentiations?
Who reads this stuff?
Tell me if you do!