The University of Southern Mississippi The Aquila Digital Community Master's Theses Summer 8-2014 Selling Tradition: Impression Management and Draft Animal Agriculture of a Mississippi Farmstead Matthew Corbin Lance University of Southern Mississippi Follow this and additional works at: https://aquila.edu/masters_theses Part of the Anthropology Commons, Geography Commons, and the Sociology Commons Recommended Citation Lance, Matthew Corbin, "Selling Tradition: Impression Management and Draft Animal Agriculture of a Mississippi Farmstead" (2014).edu/masters_theses/45 This Masters Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by The Aquila Digital Community. It has been accepted for inclusion in Master's Theses by an authorized administrator of The Aquila Digital Community. For more information, please contact Joshua. The University of Southern Mississippi SELLING TRADITION: IMPRESSION MANAGEMENT AND DRAFT ANIMAL AGRICULTURE OF A MISSISSIPPI FARMSTEAD by Matthew Corbin Lance A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate School of The University of Southern Mississippi in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Science Approved: ____________________________________ Committee Chair ____________________________________ ____________________________________ ____________________________________ Dean of the Graduate School August 2014 ABSTRACT SELLING TRADITION: IMPRESSION MANAGEMENT AND DRAFT ANIMAL AGRICULTURE OF A MISSISSIPPI FARMSTEAD This thesis is a case study of a family of farmers in Mississippi’s Piney Woods who use horse-drawn equipment to grow crops.
This practice is notable in the context of a larger agricultural system that prioritizes mechanization (particularly the use of tractors). The production style and their use of local direct selling via farmers markets allowed them to thrive economically because they were able to tap into a niche market of consumers desiring an alternative to the modern, conventional agricultural system. Other literature on Alternative Food Networks (AFN) discusses the issues of alterity and appropriation—that is, whether AFN ventures are sufficiently alternative and are not simply fronts for the very institutions or global players being resisted—but does not get into how participants—producers in particular—might utilize impression management strategies to convince others that they are sufficiently alternative. The family in question used narrative, rhetoric, and space to convince others that they carried alterity and also that they were traditional; the spaces they constructed on their property, which included a general store, gave visitors the impression of a restoration of the past.
Both impression management and nostalgia played into what I call the traditional– modern framework, a conceptional arena that allowed participants to reflect their sense of identity and ideology. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This thesis would not have been possible were it not for my thesis director, Dr. Jeffrey Kaufmann, who not only put me in contact with the Vardaman family but also assisted me in learning the ways of an anthropologist and constantly challenged my assumptions. I am also thankful for the assistance of the other committee members, Dr.
Bridget Hayden and Dr. Dana Fennell, who showed great patience and encouragement throughout the process of its construction and who steered me in the right direction when I felt lost. A special thanks also goes out to Dr. Nicholas Pagnucco, who took the time out of his busy schedule one February morning to discuss the works of Bruno Latour with me and gave some insights that helped in my discussion of modernity.
iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS .iv LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS .1 The Role of the Anthropologist II.17 Careful Consumption Farmers Markets Conclusion III.32 Collection Analysis Trustworthiness Member Checking The Merits of This Methodology IV. FARMERS MARKETS…………………………………………………46 Impression Management The Booth Participants Market Script Discussion Conclusion V.75 General Store Community Spaces Bulk Foods Christmas in the Orchard iv Economics of Agritourism Conclusion VI. TRADITIONAL–MODERN FRAMEWORK………………………….92 Alternative Modernities Hybrid Formation and Purification Relationship to the Past Rupture Conclusion VII.125 Regard Tradition Alterity Reflexivity Further Research APPENDIXES.
143 v LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 1. Town Square Park. Vardaman Farmers Market Booth Layout. Layout of Vardaman’s General Store.
Rocking Chairs in the Store’s Patio Area. Employees Only Sign. Carolers Singing at Christmas in the Orchard. Christmas Tent with Festive Goodies to Buy.
Screenshot Showing Two Teenage Girls in “Pioneer” Clothes. Learning Stations Map. Screenshot of Lunchtime. 108 vi 1 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION After working at a Texas ranch for three years, James Vardaman returned to his Mississippi home with a team of horses and a drive to use them.
James had grown up fascinated with work horses. In high school, he had farmed with teams of horses, working on the land with horse-drawn equipment to grow crops and then selling the produce. He had sought out others who also worked with horses, people who shared their techniques and their philosophy about animals. But, once he graduated from high school, he had stopped working with draft horses.
He studied animal science at Mississippi State University and then bounced around the country working various jobs. He still had horses, he still used horses, and continued to learn about them, but he was not farming with them. It was only after working at the ranch in Texas, when he helped his boss buy a team of horses, that James’s passion resurfaced. In the late 2000s, he bought a team of his own and transported them back to his Mississippi home.
He presented the horses to his mother and father and said he wanted to farm with them. James and his parents, Chelsea and Henry, already had the land for it: a 40-acre pecan orchard where they had been holding an annual festival since 1986, when he was still in high school. The Festival was a growing economic event in their town, modeled after an “old timey” county fair. It often evoked feelings of nostalgia among festivalgoers and Chelsea grew excited at the idea of horse-drawn farming displays, which would be easy to tie in to the Festival because of how they reminded people of the way farming used to be.
2 But James wanted more than a show. Farming with a team of horses would allow him to have a job he really enjoyed. So many people hate their jobs, slogging through the work week and then trying to compress their real lives into short weekends. Farming was its own reward to James.
So, for it to be worthwhile, it had to be real. “I’d like to have a farm,” he said to them. “Not just a petting zoo. I’d like to have a farm.” If James was going to farm, they all were; their decades of work with the Festival had gotten them used to sharing in profits and losses.
The farm became a reality for them, and they found it rewarding to sell their produce at local farmers markets in nearby Hattiesburg and Laurel. After a few years of this, they expanded their shared enterprise and opened up Vardaman’s General Store on their property where they sold hard-to-find bulk items and served lunches each day. In addition to continuing to run the annual Festival, they also started up a Christmas in the Orchard event each December and began running periodic “living history” tours for schoolchildren. These activities each reflected the Vardamans’ sense of who they were and how best to do things, though it was clear that they would not have participated if there were not also long-term economic benefits.
The effort to work together as a family turned James and his parents into a full-time economic unit. Because they recognized their individual strengths and interests, they took on informal roles that allowed them to complement each other. James was most knowledgeable about animals and did the most to work with them and make sure they were taken care of. When the workload was too much for James and his parents, they would recruit high school age boys to help out, and James was normally 3 their immediate boss.
He was also a youth minister and was often playful when he interacted with teenage boys, poking at or teasing them. Henry grew up in a family of sharecroppers and so he helped with the upkeep of the land and fed the animals. He was retired by this time, having worked several decades for a local power company, and he treated the farm as part of his retirement. He was soft- spoken and easygoing so that he mostly went along with the plans that James and Chelsea made, although he was not afraid to voice his opinion when he felt they were not being practical.
When Chelsea helped with the farming, it was usually to pick produce. Otherwise, she ran the store, doing the administrative paperwork to make sure it was well-stocked and working with the cooks she had hired to determine what to serve for lunch each day. She took a major role in putting out promotional materials, as well as advertising for the store and the Festival in various magazines. She also began orchestrating living history tours on their property as an educational tool for school children.
While she had a strong presence in the store, she often left it to Henry or James to sit and visit with guests. “I am not a people person,” she said to me. “Henry will stand and talk to people for hours, and I just don’t have the patience for that.” In addition to allowing them to act as an economic unit, these activities— particularly growing crops and then selling them at local farmers markets—allowed their farm to become an accessway into a community of people seeking an alternative to the contemporary mainstream food system. This is what drew me to the Vardaman family.
I came to Mississippi from California and began a long, drawn-out process of getting to know James and his family enough to write about them. I am not a rural Southerner and, 4 with my small frame, pale skin, and horn-rimmed glasses, look more like a bookish intellectual than a farmer; it was easy to see me as an outsider, a detached west-coast liberal unable to appreciate the ways of a country farm deep in Mississippi’s Pine Belt. But it was also apparent that I was serious about understanding the Vardamans. Over time, I developed a relationship with them so that they felt comfortable with me enough to drop their guard and open up.
In order to see the relevance of the Vardamans’ activities, it is important to understand the context in which they acted. A review on existant literature covering the search for alternative, sustainable foods shows that communities seeking such alternatives are a source of both confusion and concern for scholars. The growing body of such alternatives complicates the meta-narratives assuming continuing globalization, as they act as a form of resistance that is also under the threat of being swallowed up by the very forces being resisted (Kirwan 2004). By participating in farmers markets, the Vardamans situated themselves within a community of those desiring this sort of alterity, and the review in the next chapter is designed to show what was at stake for the Vardaman family.
For the most part, however, literature on these communities tends to gloss over the meaning that people make from their surroundings and those they interract with. For the Vardamans, a big part of this was a sense of a return to lost lifeways. With visitors coming each day for lunch, there were many opportunities for them to see James working with the horses. He welcomed the community, often stopping to greet people he knew.
He had no problem with them standing at the edge of the field, holding a Styrofoam cup of sweet tea, and watching him move the horses back and forth, disking the soil or 5 spreading fertilizer. These visitors, primed by the store’s food, the rocking chairs on its patio, the horses, the music, and the collection of antiques lying around the farm, had the tendency to see the past come alive with James and his horses. They often assumed that this was why the Vardamans farmed the way they did, to bring the past back. But this was not the case for James.