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New Moral Economies in Western Sicily: Fair-Trade

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New Moral Economies in Western Sicily: Fair-Trade NEW MORAL ECONOMIES IN WESTERN SICILY: FAIR-TRADE AND ORGANIC AGRICULTURE BETWEEN CHANGE AND CONSTRAINT Giovanni Orlando A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology GOLDSMITHS COLLEGE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON 2011 1 I hereby declare that the work presented in this thesis is entirely my own. Giovanni Orlando 2 ABSTRACT This thesis addresses the dialectic between capitalist values and those of moral economy, and the implications of that dialectic for how people who are engaged in alternative economic practices in Palermo and western Sicily experience their agency. It examines in particular the local commodity network created by people who practised ethical consumption and who worked in fair-trade retail and organic farming. It is based upon fifteen months of fieldwork in the city of Palermo, Sicily’s capital, and its rural province, among predominantly lower-middle-class citizens. In contrast to abstract views of the market logic as the dominant one in industrialised societies, the people of Palermo and western Sicily drew upon numerous values from outside a capitalist belief system to conceptualise the economy as a moral construct. However, the ways in which they did so were mobile, contested and ambiguous, and varied along the lines of production, exchange and consumption. The thesis explores how notions of value, normativity and motivations to behave ethically in economic processes all had to be negotiated through the demands of daily life. It therefore argues that the economic, political, and cultural constraints faced by people striving to build alternative economies cannot be overlooked, thus interrogating ethnographically the central anthropological issue of how and if economies are embedded in social relations. After the introduction (chapter 1), the discussion begins with an outline of the three main groups of actors—consumers, fair-traders and farmers—and a critical historical review of western Sicily and Palermo (chapter 2). Each group is then analysed in detail (chapters 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7), by looking at how agency is played out both at the symbolic and practical level. Finally, chapter 8 highlights the commonalities and contradictions shown by the local moral economy. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract 3 Acknowledgements 7 List of Illustrations 8 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 9 1.1 The fair-trade and organic movements in history and text 11 1.2 Historical notes on moral economy, capitalism, and embeddedness 16 The (im)possible moral economy of capitalism 21 1.3 Movements, process, and plural economies beyond the market society 25 1.4 Mediterranean anthropology, Sicilian culture, and moral economy 33 Building theories, creating paradigms 34 Towards new epistemologies 37 1.5 Methods, ethics, and structure of thesis 40 CHAPTER 2 WESTERN SICILY AND PALERMO: A BRIEF HISTORY 46 Introduction 46 2.1 From agrarian to capitalist world system 56 1300s-1700s: a semi-colony in the world system 57 1800s-1920s: modernity and the birth of the Italian nation-state 61 2.2 Modernisation without development 65 Conclusion 73 CHAPTER 3 ETHICAL CONSUMPTION AND THE VALUES OF ORGANIC AND FAIR-TRADE FOODS 74 Introduction 74 3.1 Health and nature between self-reflexivity and culture 78 Lay food taxonomies 81 3.2 On bio-technological risk: eating organic to ‘lower the dose of poisons’ 84 Out-of-place food 86 3.3 Fair-trade, ‘bloodsucker’ globalisation, and ‘just returns’ 90 The importance of labour-value in economic exchange 93 3.4 Workers first 99 From reciprocity... 99 ...to the inalienability of the fair-trade commodity-gift 103 Conclusion 107 CHAPTER 4 CONSUMING ETHICALLY AND EVERYDAY LIFE: HOUSEHOLDS, COMMUNITY, AND CLASS 109 Introduction 109 4.1 Ethical shopping as family shopping 112 4 Buying groceries between home and workplace 115 4.2 The gender of ethical consumption 118 Sexual roles and the household division labour 122 4.3 Power, place, and consumption as tool 127 Widening the circle of society 129 4.4 The circle of society...or the archipelago? 133 Conclusion 136 CHAPTER 5 FAIR-TRADE AND MODELS OF LIVELIHOOD: NECESSITY AND COOPERATION 138 Introduction 138 5.1 Fair-trade as workers’ self-help 144 Lavoro vero and necessitá 144 Making a living in Sicily 148 5.2 The value of wage labour in an unequal country 151 On volunteers, stentare to pay salaries, and not ‘screwing up’ 152 Tracing work imaginaries across the livelihood divide 156 5.3 Working to ‘make a living’, not ‘wear a suit’ 161 Conclusion 165 CHAPTER 6 FAIR-TRADING: OF CLERKSHIP, SEASONAL WORKLOADS, AND RETAIL COMPETITION 167 Introduction 167 6.1 Shop-keeping groundwork and ethical alienation 169 Wrapping gifts and coping with customers: stress at the workplace 172 6.2 Friends, family and the state: the work cycle through highs and lows 175 The scope and significance of charitable labour for the work cycle 179 6.3 The ambiguities of agency in the market 183 Commercial strategies from the bottom-up 187 Conclusion 192 CHAPTER 7 ORGANIC FARMING: WORKING THROUGH NATURE(S) AND MARKET(S) 194 Introduction 194 7.1 Farmers’ identity: of health, responsibility, and innovation 201 Of conventional agriculture and its practitioners 205 7.2 Cultivating organically: “It’s the plants that tell us what to do” 207 Collaboration and stewardship vs. resources and productivism 212 7.3 The system of provision: direct sales, stores, and middlemen 215 Coping with market distance and its effect on food prices 219 7.4 Between fragmented production and insufficient demand 223 Conclusion 227 5 CHAPTER 8 SOME CONCLUSIONS ON SICILY, CAPITALISM, AND MORAL ECONOMY 229 8.1 Western Sicily and Palermo: the histories of now 230 8.2 The mythology of alternative foods 239 8.3 Just exchange, fair prices, and the value of labour 244 8.4 Economic scale, imagined society, and class 249 8.5 The purpose of Work 258 Bibliography 264 6 ACKOWLEDGEMENTS First of all, I want to thank the Palermitans and Sicilians who appear in these pages for their kindness and willingness to share their lives with me. I spent such an interesting time with them, learnt a lot, and had fun. I would also like to thank the members of the Anthropology Department at Goldsmiths College who commented on my work: particularly Catherine Alexander, my first supervisor, and Victoria Goddard, my second supervisor, but also Sophie Day, David Graeber, Keith Hart, Mao Mollona, and Frances Pine. Thanks also to my fellow post- graduate students for our discussions, especially Veronica Barassi, Emma Felber, Luna Glucksberg, Elena Gonzalez-Polledo Bermudez, Anna Lavis, and Sarah O’Neill. I was lucky enough to present drafts of some of the chapters in this thesis as seminar and conference papers; my gratitude goes to the people who provided feedback on them so skilfully. The Economic and Social Research Council and the Royal Anthropological Institute both provided funding for my PhD. Their support was essential. I would also like to thank Deborah for giving me hospitality in an ideal setting. Finally, to Livia: for your help and support in all aspects of my life...somehow we made it through. 7 List of Illustrations Map 1: Palermo’s city centre 52 Map 2: Sicily and its geography 56 Figure 1: via Albergheria 47 Figure 2: church remains and building 48 Figure 3: a view of the historic city centre 49 Figure 4: ancient water system and hospital square 50 Figure 5: the metro 51 Figure 6: the ’good’ Palermo 63 Figure 7: contemporary lower-middle-class dwellings 70 Figure 8: the territory close to Francesco’s farm 199 Figure 9: the area close to Giuseppe’s farm 200 Figure 10: weeds and compost 211 Figure 11: rows of green peppers 223 8 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION In 2006, one of the first episodes of my fieldwork was a meeting held by the Palermitan chapter of the Lilliput Network, a national collective of left-wing and Catholic activists working in the anti-globalisation movement.1 I had learnt of the occasion through an email circulated on the group’s listserv, which specified only the time and place without a programme. I had been involved with the Network during my university years in Palermo, and after moving to London for postgraduate studies in 2004, I used the listserv to keep in touch with its activities. The meeting took place in mid-October, on a day that felt still quite warm. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) had agreed to host the meeting in its headquarters. (As an informal grouping of activists, the Lilliput Network had no permanent base and always relied on more formal groups to find venues to meet.) The Palermitan office of the WWF was located in a building in the posh northern area of the city. Only seven people were present that afternoon: two women in their early twenties, both of whom were university students; two men in their thirties; two in their forties; and one in his fifties. After some initial chatter, we began the meeting proper. First, one of the women reported back on some of the Network’s national activities, in which she was involved as a result of attending university in the north of the country. Almost all the campaigns she talked about seemed to be happening there. As the conversation about these events progressed, I was struck by the apparent lack of any local agenda to discuss, and started wondering why the meeting had been called for in the first place. Eventually, someone voiced a similar concern, and asked to shift the focus back to Palermo and Sicily. Three of the people who were there had come to share local news. Among them were a man in his thirties, who belonged to another environmental NGO, the leftist ‘Greens, Environment, and Society’ (GES), and a much older man, who turned out to be a farmer.
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