| Chapter 1: | ADM, A Tomato Named Local Lucy, and Small Farms: The Ecology and Reemergence of Farmers’ Markets |
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Certainly one issue encountered by Brown is the tendency by some anthropologists to use terminology borrowed from literary criticism (Kottak, 1998). This trend distances anthropology—a discipline about people—from people who, if not for the misdirected communication, would be interested in what we say. The effort to develop a local food system and all its associated benefits is a multidisciplinary endeavor. Our research and its implications should be accessible to interested practitioners of other disciplines and to food system advocates. We should be brokers of communication among groups, not part of the problem.
Applied anthropologists have an affinity for the use of theoretical approaches and perspectives associated with ecological anthropology. Ecological anthropology (subsumed under environmental anthropology) is a very big tent that encompasses human ecology, cultural ecology, and other “ecological” approaches practiced by anthropologists, sociologists, and geographers. Among these ecological approaches is political ecology, which is actively utilized by applied anthropologists. A commonly used definition for political ecology originated with Blaikie and Brookfield (1987): “…'political ecology’ combines the concerns of ecology and a broadly defined political economy. Together this encompasses the constantly shifting dialectic between society and land-based Resources, and also within classes and groups within society itself” (p. 17).
For anthropologists, political ecology connects components of cultural ecology and political economy and offers the ability to take wide views of interactions within a system (Greenberg & Park, 1994). It embraces multidimensional (local, regional, national, and global), multiscale (vertical and horizontal), and historic perspectives. This approach emphasizes the connections of a locale to a regional or global level (Brosius, 1999; Stonich, 1995).