Document Type

Article

Publication Date

9-2024

Abstract

Permaculture systems are, not just “consciously designed landscapes” for doing sustainable and localized food production (Holmgren 2020), but are also sites for the promise of a “sustainable culture” (ibid). Like other emergent social movements that propose alternatives to address the global food crisis and resist the neoliberal food regime, permaculture brings a transnationally conveyed sustainable agriculture framework that must contend with the existing organization of local relations in as well as outside of agricultural production. Various iterations of permaculture in the world (e.g., ecovillages, intentional communities, transition towns, food forests and local gardens) reveal that context-based sociocultural relations and political economies mediate the intentions of permaculture ethics and design (Flores 2020; Kristensen 2018; Leahy 2021). This qualitative research is an initial exploration of sociocultural configurations in Philippine permaculture projects. After all, food is embedded within social reproduction; to attain food sovereignty is to contend with the social embeddedness of permaculture and other approaches, and thus to problematize its localization (Gürcan 2011). As an initial part of this exploration, this research presents the findings pertaining to a permaculture association with one urban and one rural site. It utilizes ethnographic research methods to gain the perspectives of permaculture actors on how permaculture ethics and design are localized in the sociocultural relations of the specific site/s. Particularly, this study looks at this in three dimensions that reflect the essential sociocultural elements of food sovereignty: 1) relationships in ownership and management of the permaculture system and its resources, 2) relationships of food production and distribution, and 3) relationships in knowledge curation and skill building relating to permaculture and food. Finally, as an anthropological research, inquiring into the localization of food sovereignty through the example of permaculture serves as a window into the simultaneity of the global and local in “situated yet interrelated” knowledges and practices (Pottier 1999; Moore 1996) and the flows and disjunctures of process geographies (Appadurai 2000) that are creating new assemblages of agricultural development.

Comments

This paper was presented at the second joint symposium on planetary health entitled, “Food, Culture, Community and Environment” organized by the University of Malaysia Sabah in Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia and Nagasaki University, Japan last September 25-28, 2024. The paper will be published in the Symposium Proceedings to be completed this year by UMS-NU.

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