Caring Nature
Join current Resident Artist Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai for a study group on community care and nature stewardship in anarchist practices
Session 1: December 10
Reading:
The Gift, Chapters 1 & 2, Lewis Hyde
“An Immediatist Potlatch”, Hakim Bey in Immediatism
Activity:
Introduction with creating a list of questions and interests under the theme
Organizing a potluck that would meet the precepts of the Gift and immediatism. What rules/ways to organize/questions do we want to bring to the “banquet”? How do we want to define gift-giving and generosity?
About Caring Nature
What is the value of human life outside wage/labor and consumerism? How do we sustain ourselves and our community without being extractive and destructive to the environment? How do we learn to organize collectively, socially and politically in relation to Nature?
In Peter Kropotkin’s book, Mutual Aid (1902), the Russian anarchist posits that cooperation, not competition, is at the base of natural evolution, both in animal and human groups. He traced the evolution of voluntary cooperation from the tribe, peasant village, and medieval commune to a variety of modern associations—trade unions, learned societies, the Red Cross—that have continued to practice mutual support despite the rise of the coercive bureaucratic state. The trend of modern history, he believed, was pointing back toward decentralized, nonpolitical, cooperative societies in which people could develop their creative faculties without interference from the governing bodies.
A modern example is the ZAD, the French rural militant occupation and autonomous zone, which successfully halted the construction of an international airport. In We Are 'Nature' Defending Itself. Entangling Art, Activism and Autonomous Zones by Isabelle Fremeaux and Jay Jordan, the preservation of swamp lands by communal occupation becomes a radical political action against climate disaster and extractive capitalism. Finding one’s place as stewards for Nature is to regenerate abundance. Utopia is not a future we are patiently waiting for but can be implemented in our current times.
As access to Nature, from the food we consume to the environment in which we live, becomes more and more limited, subjected under the same rule of scarcity and hoarding tendencies as commodities, we have lost agency as human individuals to choose how we want to live and exchange without depending on the monopoly of capitalism. What are local and personal initiatives in the Twin Cities that take away the main supports of economic life from corporate interests and return them to the community? What can we learn from the intersections of food justice, climate justice, housing rights and indigenous rights to free ourselves from the demands of capitalism and fears of scarcity? How can we, instead, enrich our lives with generosity and care?
Event Structure
Hosted at Second Shift Studio, the study group is a self-organizing entity, primarily facilitated by Resident Artist Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai. As the group evolves, each participant is encouraged to offer ideas and facilitate a future session. This is a co-learning space in which we each contribute our own sources of knowledge and experiences. Guest speakers, local organizers, and activists are invited to present their work and further our discussions, grounding them in the concrete possibilities of anarchism.
The study group is framed by the concept of the potluck/potlatch and how we want to define acts of mutual generosity and gift-giving. The first session will be focused on studying examples of potluck/potlatch and starting to define our own rules. The last session will be a celebratory potluck/potlatch banquet, as a culmination of what we’ve learned and desired together throughout the different sessions.