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“A Mass Conspiracy To Feed People” Globalizing Cities, World-Class Waste, and the Biopolitics of Food Not Bombs David Henry Galen Boarder Giles A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2013 Reading Committee: Daniel J. Hoffman, Chair Ann Anagnost Miriam Kahn Celia Lowe Program Authorized to Offer Degree: Anthropology, Sociocultural © Copyright 2013 David Henry Galen Boarder Giles University of Washington Abstract “A Mass Conspiracy To Feed People” Globalizing Cities, World-Class Waste, and the Biopolitics of Food Not Bombs David Henry Galen Boarder Giles, PhD Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Assistant Professor Daniel J. Hoffman, PhD Department of Anthropology This is an ethnography of waste, cities, and social movements. Primarily one social movement in particular, Food Not Bombs, which recovers and freely redistributes wasted food in the public spaces of hundreds of cities, in dozens of countries, on every continent except Antarctica. In the process, chapters contest highly polarised geographies of hunger, homelessness, and public space in these places. This dissertation explores three aspects of Food Not Bombs’ context and cultural logic: (1) the ways in which waste is made and moved about in cities; (2) the ways in which those cities are becoming global in the process of waste-making (and vice versa); and (3) the ways in which this globalised waste-making cultivates globalised forms of social organisation and political resistance. This research has consisted of extensive participant-observation within Food Not Bombs chapters and some of the larger political and cultural communities in which they are embedded—Dumpster-divers, squatters, homeless advocates, punks, anarchists, and so on—in Seattle, New York City, San Francisco, Boston, Melbourne, Australia, and several other cities. It describes the link between urban globalisation and the proliferation of Food Not Bombs chapters, many of which have been located in “global” cities whose post-industrial economies are intimately entangled in global circuits of elite business investment, high-end consumption, and tourism. Each of these cities generates a wealth of world-class waste: food wasted in the interests of commodity aesthetics, buildings left empty for the sake of property speculation and gentrification, and so on. This waste, and the disparities and deprivations that correspond to it (hunger, homelessness, etcetera), are the material and political preconditions of Food Not Bombs’ work. Broadly speaking, then, this dissertation describes a sort of abject symbiosis between the development of such globalised cities and the politically resistant work of Food Not Bombs. Table of Contents Acknowledgements (7) It Takes a Village to Write a Dissertation Introduction (10) Any Given Sunday in Seattle: Discovering Shadow Economies of Waste in the Globalised City Part One Conceptual Frameworks: Abject Capital, Markets Public, and World-Class Waste Prologue, Part One (33) It’s Thanksgiving in Seattle Chapter One (36) The Anatomy of a Dumpster: Abject Capital and the Looking Glass of Value Chapter Two (63) Through the Looking Glass: Dumpster-Diving Counterpublics, Marginal Sovereignty, and Market-Publics Chapter Three (89) World Class Waste: Spectacular Capital, Markets Public, and the Erstwhile Metropolis Part Two Living in the Globalising City: Eating in Public, Broken Windows, and Mass Conspiracies Prologue, Part Two (119) Like a Picnic, Only Bigger, and with Strangers Chapter Four (126) Feeding the Abject Metropolis: Geographies of Surplus and Survival in the Globalising City Excursus (148) Broken Windows Are Primary with Respect to Civility Chapter Five (153) Like Water on a Grease Fire: State Apparatuses and War Machines Chapter Six (175) A Mass Conspiracy—To Feed People: Counterpublic Habitus and the Revolutions of Everyday Life Conclusion (204) Political Implications: An Open Letter to Food Not Bombs and Other Interested Parties Notes (227) Bibliography (241) Acknowledgements It Takes A Village to Write a Dissertation It takes a village to write a dissertation. And in this case, a decidedly global one—the people and communities I name below are located along at least three distinct coasts. Of course, any work of ethnography is, by definition, a collaborative project, and in this dissertation I endeavour to honour these collaborations in form and in spirit throughout the prose itself. But some contributions are worth making explicit below. Above all, this dissertation is a reflection of the caring labour of the different Food Not Bombs chapters with whom I have had the inestimable good fortune of working. In particular, I would like to thank Food Not Bombs Seattle, Melbourne, New York City, San Francisco, Davis, Boston, Buffalo, Berkeley, Worcester, New Brunswick, and Wellington, where various Food Not Bombs members have welcomed me into their kitchens, their homes, or both. This international community of Food Not Bombs members has offered me not only food, shelter, and a dissertation topic; they have also been a kind of home for me. Food Not Bombs members have been friends, resources, critics, and peers (and several of them have read and responded to drafts of this dissertation). Indeed, in these various capacities, many of them are named below. For all this I am beyond grateful. In addition, within the landscapes of advocacy and protest that Food Not Bombs inhabits, many other voices have also been invaluable to my work. Natalie Novak, Rachel Myers, Anitra Freeman, and Wes Browning, all presently or formerly of Seattle's Real Change street newspaper, and Kristine Cunningham, of Seattle's ROOTS homeless shelter have all been particularly helpful to me in making sense of the social and political worlds within which Food Not Bombs moves. The research would also have been impossible without the financial and material support of a range of institutions. The most important of these have been the University of Washington’s Program in the Comparative History of Ideas, the Department of Anthropology at the University of Washington, the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington, Bothell, the Martha Duggan Fellowship for Caring Labour, the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies, the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, and the Nancy Bell-Evans Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy. As for the ideas contained within this dissertation, they have grown and transformed in dialogue with a great many interlocutors, but most particularly the members of my doctoral committee, Ann Anagnost, 7 Miriam Kahn, and Celia Lowe from the Department of Anthropology, and Phillip Thurtle from the Comparative History of Ideas. I owe a debt to them not only for their intellectual guidance and critical insight, but for their encouragement, patience, and generosity. Perhaps most of all do I owe this same debt to my advisor, Danny Hoffman, who endured, engaged, queried, prompted, validated, and provoked my thinking as the broad strokes and self-assuredness of my earliest days in graduate school yielded to the more mature, nuanced, and expansive perspective at which I have aimed herein. In addition, innumerable other faculty and scholars have lent me their ears and insights over the course of this research. My writing and thinking owes much, directly or indirectly, to (in no particular order) Teresa Mares, Victoria Lawson, Crispin Thurlow, Maria Elena Garcia, Rachel Chapman, Lorna Rhodes, John Toews, Michelle Habell-Pallan, L. Shane Greene, Dylan Clark, Jeffrey Juris, Bruce Burgett, Tanya Erzen, Kathy Woodward, Michael Honey, Andrew Stone, Sunila Kale, Margaret O’Mara, James Tweedie, Sonal Khullar, John Findlay, Zev Handel, Miriam Bartha, Jabali Stewart, Alex Vitale, Jennifer Stuller, and Jill Friedberg, among others. In particular, throughout my time studying at the University of Washington, I turned to my fellow students to keep my own work in perspective, most especially Robertson Allen, Matt Hale, Dave Citrin, Amir Sheikh, Mariana Markova, and Kate Boyd. Beyond these conversations, many of the theoretical, ethical, and geopolitical explorations that have found a place in my writing have begun in the classroom. The Comparative History of Ideas Program, the Department of Anthropology, and the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington have all been beyond supportive of my pedagogical explorations. More specifically, I owe thanks to many of the faculty, graduate students, and staff with whom I have had the good fortune to share teaching workshops, classrooms, and pedagogical conversations, particularly (in chronological order) Catherine Zeigler, Rick Bonus, Third Andresen, Doug Merrell, Heidi Magi, Christina Wygant, Jeanette Bushnell, Tamara Myers, Ryan Burt, Giorgia Aiello, Georgia Roberts, Cynthia Anderson, Stacey Moran, Adam Nocek, Theron Stevenson, Rahul Gairola, Wendy Wiseman, Tim Cahill, Damarys Espinoza, Annie Bartos, Emily Clark, Erin Clowes, Jed Murr, and Alice Pedersen. I also owe a debt to Jim Clowes, who died not long before I began teaching for the Comparative History of Ideas Program and whose work I have tried to continue there in some small way. His pedagogical insights and personal legacy reminded me, perhaps more than any other, what an indispensable place compassion, intellectual humility, human diversity, and (for want of a better term) social justice have in our understanding of the world and how carefully