Michael Shi Essays - Food And Drink, Personal Life, Cheesemakers

Michael Shi Reading Response 5 This week we returned to a reading from the first week: Piers Vitebsky's "The Reindeer People." In the first week, we read about the history of reindeer people and their r elationship with reindeer. In our reading this week, Vitebsky lives with two groups of reindeer people forming "brigades" during the last years of the Soviet Empire and revisits 5 years later. Vitebesky contrasts the two brigades and how their structure changed how the State treated them and their reindeer. Brigade 10 followed a factory model, where herders worked as a team and traveled away from their families to work. The family-run brigade 7 had built a strong herd using selective breeding, but owned their herd privately. As a result, the government unnecessarily ordered brigade 7's entire herd to be slaughtered after the a few reindeer were infected with a disease. Our other reading, a chapter titled Ecologies of Production in Heather Paxon's "The Life of Cheese," follows the production of cheese in an artisanal cheesemaker and farm called Vermont Shepherd. Paxon argues that Vermont Shepherd is involved in an "ecology of production" where animals, farm life, human social attitudes, politics and other forces work together. Paxon lives with the owners of Vermont Shepherd through the production of a cheese wheel and documents the cheesemaking process, starting from milking sheep. As she reviews each step of this process, Paxon explores its role in the ecology of production. "Dairy animals are cultivated as farm laborers tasked with processing grass and twigs into milk" (Paxon, 45). Cheesemakers refer to their cheese using words such as "toddlers" or "mature," implying cheesemaking is a natural process. Paxon also analyzes the marketing of cheese, where cheesemakers "don't sell [my] cheese because it's good" but instead because of whe re and how it was made. I wasn't convinced by Paxon's argument about "ecologies of production." Paxon argues that " Vermont Shepherd comes into being through a particular ecology of production, an assemblage of organic, social, and symbolic forces " (Paxon 31). The problem I have with this definition of an ecology of production is that it could be applied to almost anything that humans produce involving organic mate rial. For example, cacao act s as converters of su nlight into food for human use. There are politics regarding the labor going into cacao plants and deforestation. Finally, there is an ideal about fair trade chocolate where labor conditions have symbolic value to a consumer. Because production always involves problems regarding labor, we get social and symbolic forces acting on any type of production. I do agree with Paxon that cheesemaking specifically stands out from other forms of production with respect to the forces surrounding it, but I didn't feel th at her stated argument did a good job of conveying that. One concern I have is that I don't get much out of many of our ethnographic readings such as the ones from Vitebsky and Evans-Pritchard that do not have a specific argument . The authors of these pieces document their experiences in the field and explain very clearly what is happening as well as provide background informatio n and I enjoy reading these studies, but I end up not thinking critically about them. For example, in this week's Vitebsky reading, I read a story about a family in Russia's struggle with the Soviet Union and its resolution, but it read to me like a chapter in a book or article I would read casually. Should I be getting more out of these readings? I find it hard to analyze their content without comparing them to other readings. Vitebsky, Piers. 2006. The Reindeer People: Living With Animals and Spirits in Siberia. Boston: Mariner Books. Chapters 3 and 4 (pp. 63-104) 7 Paxson, Heather. 2013. The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America. University of California Press. Chapter 2 "Ecologies of Production" (pp. 30-62)