Anti-Commodities Revisited: Food, Culture, and Resistance

This chapter examines the use and relevance of the concept of anti-commodity originally devised to highlight how local cultures of crop cultivation in societies under colonial rule functioned as forms of resistance to the attempted imposition of regimes of commercial agriculture. It argues that the concept remains particularly fruitful in the context of local small-farmer strategies and cultural choices around food crop cultivation and consumption. Anti-commodity defines and reveals alternative farmer value systems and cultivating practices to ongoing profit-oriented processes of commodification of food systems. The chapter outlines two research-based case studies, concretely illustrating diverse modes of counter-hegemonic food culture. One study is set in the colonial past, the other in the post-colonial present, suggesting that anti-commodity practices remain an important story to be told and heard not only about peasant pasts but also about farmer counter-movements in the contemporary world.