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Emotional Landscapes of Risk: Emotion and Culture in American Self-sufficiency Movements

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Abstract

Americans who identify as “homesteaders” and “preppers” seek to live “self-sufficient” lifestyles by distancing themselves from institutions that mediate access to the environment. This paper asks why individuals adopt “self-sufficiency” based practices and finds that they respond to discomfort about being embedded in risk society by adopting self-sufficiency as an emotion management strategy that fits within an American cultural logic of individualism. Based on ethnographic methods including interviews and participant observation representing two sub-cultures of American self-sufficiency movements, I show that cultural narratives about risk generate uncomfortable emotions that must be managed, resulting in material changes to daily practice via emotion management strategies that embrace cultural individualism. Self-sufficiency allows participants to reconcile American individualism with the lived experience of dependence on untrustworthy institutions, that expose them to global, impersonal risks, thus alleviating discomfort and reinforcing cultural beliefs. The self-sufficiency practices homesteaders and preppers adopt result in changing relationships to the environment. This paper intervenes in environmental theories that overlook the significance of emotion in shaping environmental practices and calls for a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between emotions, culture, and material practices.

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Notes

  1. I separate these layers out for analytic purposes only; in social life, they are deeply imbricated, and cannot be so easily separated. Structural conditions are informed by and experienced via culture, culture has material dimensions, and emotions are both material (in that they are embodied) and cultural (in that they are interpreted via culture). After pulling them apart for analysis, it is important that we not forget to put them back together again, although this poses its own analytic challenges.

  2. Zombies came up frequently amongst preppers, mostly in jest, but also as a heuristic device for working through a wide range of more likely scenarios.

  3. All names are pseudonyms, changed to protect the identities of research participants.

  4. The conflation of public and private interests is a hallmark of neoliberalism, according to David Harvey (2005).

  5. Of course, very few of the activities homesteaders or preppers undertook were without institutional ties; supplies for gardening, canning, shooting, rainwater collection, etc. were generally made by multinational corporations, through regulated industries. The desirability of the appearance of a direct connection to the environment is noteworthy, regardless of the available potential for living this out.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to a great many people who supported the writing of this article. I give thanks to my research participants for sharing not only their social world, but their knowledge, skills, and home-grown tomatoes. I am especially grateful to Kari Norgaard, Ryan Light, and Matt Norton, for their guidance and support. Thanks also to the anonymous peer-reviewers and editors of this journal for their insightful feedback, which improved this article substantially.

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The writing of this article was supported by funds from the University of Oregon Sociology Department and the University of Oregon College of Arts and Sciences.

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    Allison Ford

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Ford, A. Emotional Landscapes of Risk: Emotion and Culture in American Self-sufficiency Movements. Qual Sociol 44, 125–150 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-020-09456-x

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