FORAGING AT THE EDGE OF CAPITALISM

Foraging at the edge of Capitalism is a 5-year research project at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society.

Our starting point is simple: broadly understood as practices of collecting, scavenging and gleaning, foraging is not something humanity left behind in the neolithic revolution. It is very much a global phenomenon of our times. It takes place in the fuzzy fringes of a global capitalist economic system. Foraging practices feed on capitalism. And they feed it.

To understand and to render visible the resulting layers of ambition, promise, concern and practice is our goal.

In an era when the dream of a middle-class life based on a stable, salaried job seems no longer viable – or no longer desirable, or both – foraging becomes an essential resource of income and of meaning. It is both an economic strategy and a form of building relations with ones immediate surroundings.

In Tibet and Nepal, scores of pickers rush to the mountains each spring to find yartsagunbu – a rare caterpillar mushroom more valuable than gold; between Colorado and Arizona, amidst retirees and RV nomads, people make a living by foraging and thrifting. In the mountains of Albania, these vast and messy commons left behind by communism, most families collect herbs and sell them into the supply chains of the global pharmaceutical industry. And on the edge of cities in Europe and elsewhere, foragers collect fine edibles – a statement against consumerism and against the shallow taste of industrial agriculture.

To understand the entanglements between foragers and their surroundings, we need methods that reach beneath opinions, positions, beliefs and policies. Rather than starting with what people express verbally, we begin with what they do. Rather than about foraging, we work through and with the practice of foraging.

We employ an itinerant approach, following those involved in foraging into the forests, mountains and deserts and back into the lungs of global consumer capitalism. We direct our attention to the material traces of human intervention that shape an environment and work towards a contemporary archeology of our present era.

Where appropriate, we use collaborative documentary media practices. Within the context of this research, documentary film is not primarily a medium of communication or a way of reaching out to an audience. It is a method, a way of reaching in. Rather than informants or research participants, we have protagonists and crew and mentors in each research location.

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 771391).

It is hosted by the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at the University of Munich (LMU).