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Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface: The Art of Being Free -- Acknowledgments -- 1. Introduction: Making Space for Politics -- 2. Disturbing Democracy: Reading (in) the Gaps between Tocqueville's America and Ours -- 3. (Con)Founding Democracy: Containment, Evasion, Appropriation -- 4. Reading Freedom, Writing Marx: From the Politics of Production to the Production of Politics -- 5. Acting (Up) in Publics: Mobile Spaces, Plural Worlds -- Notes -- Index

AbstractFarmers in the arid high plains of Eastern Montana had long irrigated with water shunted into their fields by a dam on the Yellowstone River. Growing water‐hungry sugar beets processed at a factory in a nearby town, they created a verdant and prosperous oasis: a good life nested within a satisfyingly moral economy. However, in short order, the economic basis of this life was challenged: the dam was threatened with removal because of claims that it adversely affected an endangered fish; and the factory was threatened with closure because of claims that it was insufficiently profitable. As farmers and townsfolk confronted these challenges and the motives of those making them, they were compelled to probe the fundamental questions of what is 'moral' and what is 'economy'. Confronting their uncertain future, they wondered whether their oasis was to become an outlier.

ABSTRACTIn this article, we focus on a gift of land and its restoration. The land is a 300‐acre lakeside family farm near Brookings, South Dakota. We gave this farm to the United States Fish and Wildlife Service in 2012 to be taken from cropland and restored to prairie wetland—and at a time when high commodity prices are encouraging many farmers to do precisely the opposite, albeit not without challenge. Our intent is to explore a range of critical values—values apparent under conditions of conflict—as they have been playing out in this portion of the U.S. heartland. By going against the grain of contemporary agricultural practice, we have inserted ourselves into this conflict and have become strategically placed to contribute ethnographically to ongoing anthropological, philosophical, and environmental discussions of what nature is worth, to whom (in the past, present, and future), and why. In so doing, we follow in the footsteps of Lewis Henry Morgan and Aldo Leopold, both of whom pondered similar issues in similar places.

Many social scientists have been productively following the global flow of foods because this flow makes vivid – indeed, encapsulates – relationships between contemporary political economies. In this article, we focus on the movement of lamb/mutton flaps (sheep bellies) through a Pacific portion of the globe. Applying insights from studies of material culture, we show that the flow of a certain kind of fatty flesh – a flesh with significant material ambiguities – is particularly revealing of what are, indeed, asymmetrical relationships. When fatty flesh is a by‐product deemed edible only in the developing world, its embodiment in the (often overly) fatty flesh of developing‐world consumers lends itself to politically salient arguments about who is 'dumping' what on whom and with what effects; about who, if anyone, should be responsible for whom and in what ways.RésuméLes études sociologiques qui ont pris pour objet le flux global des produits alimentaires se sont avérées particulièrement productives dans la mesure où ce flux illustre (incarne même) de façon vivace les relations entre les économies politiques contemporaines. Les auteurs s'attachent ici aux mouvements des ventres d'agneau ou de mouton dans la région du Pacifique. À partir de l'éclairage donné par les études de la culture matérielle, ils montrent que la circulation d'un certain type de viande grasse, chair porteuse d'importantes ambiguïtés matérielles, est particulièrement révélateur de ce qui est en réalité une relation asymétrique. Dès lors que cette viande est un résidu de production, jugé consommable seulement dans les pays en voie de développement, son incorporation sous forme de matière (souvent trop) grasse par les consommateurs de ces pays se prête à une argumentation politiquement prégnante sur qui « jette » quoi et à qui, et avec quels effets, et sur qui (s'il en est un) doit être responsable de qui, et de quelle manière.