Beside the berm: The convenience of roadside picking

Piacentini, Dominic

doi:10.1002/sea2.12209

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 19 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Digging ginseng is part of a collection of livelihood activities that have long been practiced in Appalachia and that make use of forest resources (Halperin 1990; Piacentini 2021). Before the arrival of large‐scale extractive industry after the Civil War, subsistence farmers in Appalachia gathered ginseng and other valuable forest botanicals; this was a means by which they could obtain cash to spend on goods that they could not grow or manufacture themselves, such as coffee and ammunition (Manget 2012).…”

Section: Making a Living In The Forest Commonsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“We ain't never stolen a plant”: Livelihoods, property, and illegal ginseng harvesting in the Appalachian forest commons

Farley

2022

Economic Anthropology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In the southern Appalachian Mountains, wild American ginseng (Panax quinquefolius) has been harvested for commercial sale for nearly 250 years. Ginseng is vulnerable to overexploitation but can be harvested according to regulations implemented to prevent a tragedy of the commons. Despite regulations, much ginseng is harvested illegally. Conservationists, supported by American property law, tend to believe illegal ginseng harvesters are thieves interested in quickly obtaining cash. This article argues instead that many illegal ginseng harvesters believe one cannot “steal” a wild plant. Many Appalachian forest users believe the owner of a ginseng root is the person who harvests it and not the landowner. Efforts to protect ginseng often rely on excluding harvesters from accessing lands historically considered to belong to the commons, which can also exclude them from an important strategy for earning income in a region where formal living‐wage jobs are scarce. This article adds complexity to understandings of the rural poor who make a living at the edges of the global capitalist system and contributes to a more nuanced understanding of poor rural Appalachians by exploring the reasons for ginseng harvesting, a behavior that otherwise might appear consistent with negative stereotypes of Appalachian culture.

show abstract

Section: Making a Living In The Forest Commonsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“We ain't never stolen a plant”: Livelihoods, property, and illegal ginseng harvesting in the Appalachian forest commons

Farley

2022

Economic Anthropology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Introducing an anthropology of convenience

Oka

2021

Economic Anthropology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article serves to introduce the Special Issue of Economic Anthropology dedicated to “Convenience as a Driver, Mediator, and Moderator of Social Economies.” The twelve articles in this issue are based on papers presented at the fortieth annual meeting of the Society for Economic Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame from April 30 to May 1, 2020. In this introductory article, I briefly introduce, conceptualize, and generally define “convenience” as a heuristic and part of doxa and as a powerful force driving social economies, freshly revealed in the fractures left by the global COVID‐19 pandemic. I then discuss the etymology of the term convenience and review previous research on the topic of convenience within marketing, technology, business, and the medical sectors, which reveal it to be a fluid, multidimensional concept centered on key concepts such as efficiency, efficacy, ease, comfort, and/or advantage, but also culturally circumscribed. The articles in this issue speak to the complexities of “convenience” with ethnographic cases from the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Being one of the cornerstones of consumption driving contemporary global economies, “convenience” as a driver of economies has significant and even positive impacts for issues such as poverty alleviation. It also has, in this hyperscale global economic landscape, negative implications for human societies in its impacts on health and the environment. As such, I argue that convenience is a crucial topic for future anthropological concern.

show abstract

Beside the berm: The convenience of roadside picking

Cited by 2 publications

References 19 publications

“We ain't never stolen a plant”: Livelihoods, property, and illegal ginseng harvesting in the Appalachian forest commons

“We ain't never stolen a plant”: Livelihoods, property, and illegal ginseng harvesting in the Appalachian forest commons

Introducing an anthropology of convenience

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About