The construction of identity too often relies on an emphatic assertion of difference, of an inherent disconnect between a decided “self” and “other.” O’Connor worries that we have entered into a world where capital has problematically “othered” the natural ecology, both by appropriating and remaking it (238). “Physical nature,” O’Connor asserts, is “treated as if it is governed by the law of value and the process of capitalist accumulation through economic crisis,” a perspective which has paradoxically both estranged society from a nature that exists “out there,” and simultaneously given license to extract and use “nature and its products” to support unfettered economic growth. So there is a contrived and contradictory narrative of “us” and “other,” where society lives outside of, and estranged from its own physical nature. This uncanny “commodification of difference…displaces [nature as] the Other [and] denies the significance of that Other’s history through a process of decontextualization” (qtd. In Cook and Crange 1996: 145). This kind of polarizing narrative continues to dictate and mould the implicit ideological landscapes through which the individual, on a daily basis, navigates and formulates his or her own architecture of meaning, morality, and broader sense of belonging.
For Illich, this “polarizing narrative” is rooted in the word energy. “Energy,” he asserts, “became the metaphor for what is now called “basic needs,” a semantic parallel and powerful synonymic device that has made it profoundly simple for an energy-obsessed society to justify a disastrous acceleration of the rate of “energy” consumption. In Illich’s words, today’s notion of “progress reflects society’s ability to appropriate energy” (1983: 13).
This conception derives from the semantic history of the word energy itself, which was expounded by Ostwald in the early 20th century as being that which is the “only real substance, the common substrate of body and soul” (1983: qtd. in Illich, 15). Such an understanding of “energy” was then integrated into the conceptualization of the “energy intensive lifestyle,” where “jobs and watts could be recognized as basic rights because they were both interpreted as ‘basic needs’” (Illich, 1983: 17).
I summarize Illich’s historical critique of the word energy, if only briefly, because it has provided grounds for a troubling contemporary ideal of “man as an energy guzzling commodity producer,” for whom the notion of progress has been reduced to the “replacement of feet by motorized wheels”; who has lost faith in the “political power of the feet and of the tongue” (1978: 9); and who is ultimately caught up in a growing technocracy, where the preference is for a “better product, rather than freedom from servitude to it” (1978: 10).
There are few more effective and palpable ways to approach the implications of Illich’s understanding of “energy” than to focus on the biographies of the very stuff which animates much of the taken-for-granted day to day—the food and drink which we take into our bodies for pleasure; nourishment; sustenance; for energy. Tracing the global paths of this stuff—the stories of which are remarkable in their scale, their scope and their many contexts—offers valuable sites for realizing the extent to which the identity of that “energy guzzling commodity producer” is a/effected, influenced and sustained through a vast complex of spatial and interpersonal connections and choices.
In the contemporary trend of merging together materialist and culturalist analyses of what Leslie and Reimer call “politics of consumption,” the commodity chain methodology “examines consumption from the vantage point of one commodity and traces the reworking of meaning along different sites in the chain” (402). By viewing the chain as a whole rather than emphasizing production or consumption alone, McCook notes that “there are no a priori assumptions about where power is located along the chain” (269). In this way, commodity chain analyses provide the spatial breadth for critically reviewing “specific practices which shape the flow of goods,” and ideally, for coordinating comprehensive strategies for policy development and consumer resistance (Leslie and Reimer 1999: 402). In this way, the methodology of commodity chain analyses offer important criticisms of the dominant system of capitalist consumption, which “constitutes an unproductive use of surplus value in a sphere of circulation with the aim of selling commodities faster” (O’Connor, 162)
More particularly, commodity chain theory creates a much needed space for being critical about the ways in which we regulate the metabolism between humankind and nature, as well as the “metabolism between the individual and physical and social environment” (O’connnor, 167). Cook and Crang censure the exuberant lore of consumerist commodity fetishism, or what they call “constructions of ignorance,” (140) whereby the “displacement of commodities from [these] worlds of consumption produces a vacuum of meaning and knowledge to be filled” (141). Ultimately, the commodity chain as methodology aims to criticize and question the “changing institutional landscapes of who produces knowledges and the degrees to which those knowledges are trusted/valued” (Cook and Crang, 142). In laying bare the real histories and geographies of connection between commodity production and consumption, it can be hoped that processes of constructing identity will derive from a real understanding of intricate connection rather than banal assertions of “us” and “other.”
Moreover, in our high-speed, energy-obsessed present, I am interested in the way the word “energy” has been used to create a kind of symbolic edifice for the marketization of different commodities. In particular, I am interested in offering a critical review of the physical and symbolic trajectories of Guayaki’s yerba mate tea products, whose growing popularity owes both to society’s increasing awareness of the environmental impacts of consumer choice, and to the (paradoxically) growing demand for guilt-free energy supplements. By investigating the physical and symbolic trajectories of Guayaki’s yerba leaves, I hope to expose an admittedly modest but important series of relationships between the material realities and especially the symbolic constellations that inform capitalistic consumer habits, particularly for a society overwhelmed by a growing knowledge of the implications of their consumer choices.
Guayaki’s “market-driven restoration business” bears little resemblance to sixteenth century conquistadors’ yerba trade, a history which is worth mentioning, if only briefly. The 16th and 17th century extractive industries of the Americas – including that of yerba mate – proliferated with the arrival of Spanish colonizers, and were characteristically premised on “matters of trade and political possession,” (Mills and Taylor 1998: 65) rather than relationships of mutual exchange and understanding. As Reed notes, extractive economies had (and still have) a disturbing tendency to generate a labor that is subject to extreme forms of coercion, where workers are transported to extractive economies from more productive regions and are forced to depend on employers for life necessities. This notion of dependency—which implicitly underpins the theoretic dependency models put forward by Bunker and Foweraker in their discussions of unequal exchange and political economy in the Americas—is invested in the notion of an overwhelmingly powerful capitalist economy, which in turn determines relations between the economy and ‘peripheral’ societies (Bunker 1985; Foweraker 1981). This limited conceptualization is exemplified in a substantial number of ‘scholarly’ works, where a common rhetoric of devaluation is applied to yerba harvesting and production, effectively denouncing both the process and the people as a “primitive forest industry…based upon utilizing seasonal and unskilled labour” (Reber 1985: 29).
In a compelling criticism of the dependency model, Reed mobilizes an important thread of contemporary post-colonial criticism, which emphasizes the importance of broadening the epistemic perspectives which often situate the so-called third world in contemporary (often diminutive) mythologies. Part of this “broadening of perspectives” includes employing the specificities of the ‘local’ in a way which simultaneously bolsters the formation of individual entities and integrates local ‘economies’ within a global network. Reed is critical of the supposition that everyone will inevitably “adopt Western technology and culture when they understand its inherent superiority” and that “expanding capitalist systems unilaterally dominate all societies on the periphery” (Reed 1995: 21).
Reed’s criticisms are echoed in Tim Jackson’s seminal discussion of prosperity, which locates many of Reed’s ideas within the context of our so-called “Western” ideologies and realities. Jackson worries that, “in [the] formal terms [of Western capitalism], social enterprises barely count. They represent a kind of Cinderella economy that sits neglected at the margins of consumer society” (47). Jackson’s main critique is of the “growth-obsessed, resource-intensive consumer economy” which disregards the potential for meaningful work, for capabilities for flourishing, and for contributing positively to a community. As Jackson puts it, “the fetish with macro-economic labour productivity…[is] a recipe for undermining work, community and environment” (48). Jackson’s appeal for a new economy based on “economic activities that employ people in ways that contribute meaningfully to human flourishing” (47) resonates with a more theoretical recommendation put forth by Grosfoguel, who calls for more “critical dialogue between diverse critical epistemic/ethical/political/[economic/ environmental] projects towards a pluriversal as opposed to a universal world” (Grosfoguel 2008: 2).
The Guayaki company has interestingly incorporated Grosfoguel’s appeal within its comprehensive, contemporary approach to the commercial distribution of yerba mate in North America. I think it is appropriate to note that Guayaki in fact began as a modest university senior project, co-founded by Alex Pryor from Argentina and David Karr from California. From its moment of inception, then, the project was mobilized from two significantly different, geographically contextual perspectives (Simard 2009).
Pryor, whose educational background focused on food sciences, was struck by the tremendous coffee consumption patterns of North America. He directly related this pattern of consumption to the fast paced nature of everyday life in North America, a tempo which, he posited, could find an alternative supplementation in a healthy coffee alternative: yerba mate. This insight expanded into a dimensional complex of emerging trends, which Pryor identified as an intriguing “convergence of times—people were discovering green tea’s health properties, hearing more about the destruction of the rainforest and about the plight of the native forest peoples” (The Guayaki Story).
Here, I cannot help but reintroduce Illich’s depiction of the “energy guzzling commodity producer,” an image that remained in the back of my head as I missioned through the Guayaki website. It is here that the company assumes its considerable transparency through extensive elaborations of business initiatives, environmental and social programs, and scientific health studies. A colourful photo montage of smiling children, focused workers, contented customers and the amiable co-founders of the company gives the website visitor a feeling of connectivity to the small narratives that animate the seemingly linear traversals of yerba mate, from the forests of Latin America to the bottles and tea cups of North American homes.
After a thoroughly engaging tour through the bulky literature of the Guayaki website, I almost felt like part of the Guayaki team myself, and so felt no hesitation to reach out on a more personal level with a short list of questions, which I hoped would supplement the information I had already gleaned from the website. It came as a surprise, then, when my friendly phone inquiry to company headquarters was quickly terminated: my queries, I was told, could be handled more efficiently by email. Frustratingly, the response to my email was an impersonal memo of appreciation for my interest in the Guayaki company, followed by a link to their website.
This highly “efficient,” speedy and impersonal exchange seemed inconsistent with the Guayaki marketing efforts, which undeniably appeal to the ‘intentional consumer.’ As I expanded my efforts to connect with Guayaki affiliates and associates, a different theme of intrigue saturated my investigations: Guayaki is more than a restorative business model. It is more than a brand name. It is much more than the simple yerba mate leaves which it distributes in attractive packaging. Guayaki is a lifestyle. The “Guayaki Mate Zone,” Guayaki’s facebook page, is teeming with ‘candid,’ ‘authentic’ pictures of young, new-age caucasian hippies sipping mate from hammocks in the jungle; grungy surfers quenching their thirst and “recharging” with the naturally caffeinated beverage for another day riding the waves; hip folk musicians drinking mate from gourds back stage at popular folk festivals. All these images purport a qualitative aesthetic; a desirable lifestyle, unmoored from all that is so undesirable about the “institution” of capitalism.
Is Guayaki’s yerba mate just another currency for the ‘globally conscientious,’ privileged North American individual? I wonder if it not too bold to suggest that Guayaki’s mission statement as a “market-driven restoration business” is a direct appeal to the culturally dispossessed Western consumer of the 21st century. The notion of distinct cultures (and the identities which derive from concepts of culture) is being radically challenged as a result of rapidly expanding global capitalism. If, as Mitchell suggests in his subversive criticism of contemporary cultural ontology, culture “is not a thing, process, sphere or realm in and of itself,” but is rather “a system of power and an imposition of meaning,” (112) it would follow that the Guayaki company is in fact quite active in implicitly deploying and sustaining a regime of marketing might by employing the structurally versatile notion of culture to sell its products.
According to Mitchell, cultural life, which is arguably the fundamental building block of individual identity construction, is in large part the mediation of production and consumption within every day life. Mitchell’s assertion that the currency of culture is ultimately “its ability to integrate by denying connections at some scales and by over-valorizing localism,” (111) resonates with my own inconsistent encounters with the Guayaki organization, most notably my failure to engage in an interpersonal exchange with an individual voice from company headquarters. After the difficulties I experienced in my attempts to speak with a representative of Guayaki, it struck me as paradoxical that the lifestyle Guayaki seeks to purport demands localization. Using Mitchell’s words, localization requires “that distinctions be clearly demarcated at the expense of the scalar messiness of social interaction” (112).
Tragically consistent with the growing repertoire of my own ‘socially interactive’ failures was a call to my favourite distributor of natural and whole bulk foods. Though I never got through to the manager after I was put on hold, a soothing, pre-recorded female voice took me on an interesting auditory tour of Famous Foods. I was informed of their diverse and “exotic” stock of “hard to find foods and spices from India!” I was assured that I did not need to travel the world in order to experience the “plantations of the East Indies” or “the peppers of Mexico.” In other words, by making a localized consumer choice at Famous Foods, it was supposedly within the realm of possibility to instantaneously join the ranks of a cosmopolitan community from home!
After a conversation with Marc Simard (director for the Victoria-based Northernite Syndicate, which has as one of its main affiliates the Guayaki company), in which he gave me a detailed description of internal structure of Guayaki’s distribution system, he admitted that “it’s more complicated than that in real life. Nothing in reality works seamlessly, right? There are always gaps and overlaps that get overlooked in the bigger picture” (Simard, nor. Syn. Director).
I think this is what Mitchell emphasizes when he argues that “the currency of ‘culture,’” or what Marc calls ‘the bigger picture,’ “is precisely its ability to integrate by denying connections at some scales and over-valorizing localism” (111). In the case of Guayaki, it is the lines of connection which tether the consumer to a constructed aesthetic, an intricately designed lifestyle, that slip away into abstraction and ambiguity in favour of the material realities of yerba mate production. In this way, the integral symbolic edifice of the Guayaki business model is displaced, or overlooked, by a method of “over-valorizing localism.”
Guayaki’s co-founders, in their determination to “take [Guayaki] yerba mate from the natural-food niche into the mainstream market,” will inevitably push their ‘market-driven restoration business’ project into the compromising dimensions of another scale, with a whole new range of implications. Guayaki’s successful integration into the mainstream market economy could jeopardize the unique structure of a company which derives and purports its grassroots aesthetic, it’s ‘culture,’ its very identity, from the simple fact that it is “run by a bunch of best friends” who work actively to make their business transparent and accessible to the consumers of their product.
For Jackson, Guayaki’s aspiration to integrate into the “mainstream market economy” could be seen as a step in the wrong direction. To do well, according to Jackson, is largely about “the ability to give and receive love, to enjoy the respect of your peers, to contribute useful work, and to have a sense of belonging and trust in a community.” Prosperity, he concludes, is fundamentally “rooted in vital social and psychological dimensions,” which admittedly operate on a much different scale than the market economy (Jackson, 7).
And so recognizing the ways in which notions of identity and culture are both purported by and derived from “ethically” motivated companies like Guayaki, sheds interesting light on the careful assemblage of palatable identities or lifestyles that seek to be consistent with the ideological and cultural frameworks they are a part of. The main concern for Illich, who wrote much of his prophetic work over a quarter of a century ago, was that this culture is dangerously close to giving way to a topsy turvy technocracy that champions the rights of its consumers at the expense of prosperity, civil society and the environment.
Mitchell’s own thesis of culture and consumption—which argues that cultural life is in large part the mediation of production and consumption within every day life—is powerfully linked to Illich’s work. Particularly, an interesting parallel can be made between Mitchell’s cultural thesis and Illich’s discussion of energy as both a “theoretical notion and [a] social construct” (17). If, as Illich posits, “the word energy functions as a collage of meanings whose persuasiveness is based on the myth that what it expresses is natural,” then, surreptitiously, our “lifestyle[s]…become energy intensive” (17). In other words, the word energy has become a bedrock term, unshakable from those processes by which we understand, formulate and assert our identity and the culture to which those identities belong. The word “energy” is itself, in a sense, the very fabric of our cultural identity.
Understanding energy in this way is problematic because it paralyzes our capacity to understand the relationship between energy and equity, and to differentiate between the standards of our own “basic needs” for energy, and those standards held by other people, cultures and civilizations, both presently and in the past. When energy – as a vehicle of cultural formation – becomes “logically unknowable… amorphous and physically unobservable, nothing but a shapeless presupposition” (Illich, 1983: 19), so too does the principle currency of culture become vested in a process which can only integrate by virtue of denying.
What I am trying to articulate is that our understanding of energy and culture are unambiguously interdependent. The ways in which we consume energy simultaneously define the way we consign our personal identities to a particular culture, just as our cultures are mediated through those very same processes of production and consumption. David Harvey understands this as a process of creative destruction, where the “process of development, even as it transforms the wasteland into a thriving physical and social space, recreates the wasteland inside the developer himself. This,” he asserts, “is how the tragedy of development works” (Harvey 16). So even as we develop our intentional, “informed,” and “conscientious” consumer choices, I wonder if we are not slowly chipping away at the potential to develop a strong civil society which defines itself not by its freedoms of consumer choice, but rather in terms of its “commons,” its solidarity and its shared struggles.
I must admit though, almost as a postscript and with a quiet smile, that food and drink will always attain to the impossible by bringing the entirety of human experience into the rays of their prisms. Whether through jokes, rants or whispers, the way we eat and drink can always encourage us to let the whole world in, and ultimately, to sit down together.
References:
Bunker, Stephen. 1985. Underdeveloping the Amazon: Extraction, unequal exchange and the failure of the modern state. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Cook, I. & P. Crang. 1996. The World on a Plate: culinary culture, displacement andgeographical knowledges. Journal of Material Culture 1(2): 131-153.
Deborah Leslie and Suzanne Reimer. 1999. Spatializing commodity chains. Progress in Human Geography 23(3): 401-420.
Foweraker, Joe. 1981. The struggle for land: A political economy of the pioneer frontier in Brazil from 1930 to the present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Grosfoguel, R. 2008. Transmodernity, border thinking, and global coloniality: Decolonizing political economy and postcolonial studies. Eurozine.
Illich, Ivan. “Energy and Equity” from Toward a History of Needs. New York: Pantheon, 1978.
Illich, Ivan. “The Social Construction of Energy.” From a seminar on The Basic Option Within Any Future Low-Energy Society, Mexico: July 1983.
Jackson, Tim. “Prosperity without growth? The transition to a sustainable economy”
McCook, Stuart. 2008. Coffee and Flowers. Latin American Studies Association 43(3): 268-277.
Mitchell, Don. 1995. There’s No Such Thing as Culture. Wiley-Blackwell Publishing. New Series 20(1) 102-116.
O’Connor, James. “Is Sustainable Capitalism Possible?” and “The Second Contradiction of Capitalism” from Natural Causes. New York and London: Guildford Press, 1998.
Reed, Richard K. 1995. Prophets of Agroforestry. University of Texas Press, Austin.
Simard, Marc. 2010. Telephone communication. Director of NorthernItes Syndicate.
Reber (1985) Commerce and Industry in Nineteenth Century Paraguay: The Example of Yerba Mate. The Americas 42(1): 29-53.
Welcome to Guayaki. Website development and hosting by TechXpress. Nov-Dec 2010. http://guayaki.com/.