STS.037 / STS.427
FOOD AND POWER
Mondays, 1-4, E51-278, Fall 2001
Prof. Deborah Fitzgerald, E51-290/617-253-7752/dkfitz@mit.edu
This class will consider the intersection of science and technology with agriculture and food production systems in the 20th century. A basic premise is that, when things become industrialized and rationalized, they follow particular historical patterns that tend to play themselves out over and over in different locations. Another premise, however, is that local circumstances never quite fit the patterns that have evolved, and historians must pay close attention to the differences between the micro and the macro, the universal and the particular, the state and the farmer. We will try to understand these things by reading historical and anthropological essays on the relation between rural life, scientific institutions, technological and managerial innovations, agricultural production, and politics in America and the third world.
Requirements
Students are required to attend all classes and be prepared to discuss the assigned readings. Each student will lead discussion at least once during the term. Although there will be no exams, each student must write either an original research paper on a topic of interest to the student or a bibliographic essays on a set of outside readings.
All readings are available at the Tech Coop except Big Sugar and “Accounting for Change,” which will be distributed in class.
10 September Introduction
17 September no class
24 September Thinking About Agricultural Change
James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Various Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998)
1 October Plantation and Empire
Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (NY: Penguin, 1985)
8 October no class
15 October Producers and Consumers in the American Countryside
David Danbom, Born in the Country: A History of Rural America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995)
Hal Barron, Mixed Harvest: The Second Great Transformation in the Rural North, 1870-1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997)
22 October California and the Labor Regime
Carey McWilliams, Factories in the Fields: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California (Boston: Little, Brown, 1939)
Sucheng Chan, This Bittersweet Soil: The Chinese in California Agriculture, 1860-1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986)
29 October Styles of Modernity
Mark Kramer, Three Farms: Making Meat, Milk and Money from the American Soil (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980)
Steven Stoll, The Fruits of Natural Advantage: Making the Industrial Countryside in California (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1996)
5 November The American Midwest
Jane Adams, The Transformation of Rural Life: Southern Illinois, 1890-1990 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994)
Deborah Fink, Cutting into the Meatpacking Line (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998)
12 November no class
19 November The American South
Alec Wilkinson, Big Sugar (New York: Knopf, 1987)
Neil Foley, The White Scourge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997)
26 November The Farm Crisis
Kathryn Dudley, Debt and Dispossession (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000)
Film: “Troublesome Creek: A Midwestern”
3 December Rationalizing Food
Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (NY: Houghton Mifflin, 2001)
David Goodman and Michael Watts, Globalizing Food (London: Routledge, 1997)
10 December Green Revolution?
Akhil Gupta, Postcolonial Developments (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998)
James L. Watson, Golden Arches East: McDonalds in East Asia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997)