Certain kinds of benefitting from community or social relations may require sacrificing some aspect of your immediate self-interest on behalf of others. Certain kinds of positive social transformations may require putting all your money down and taking your chances, may require a risky transparency to the state or other powerful institution. In both cases, actually, I think there are reasons to be modestly critical of the way that ordinary people hedge their bets against power. Friends and colleagues who straightforwardly accept the accuracy of Frederick Cooper’s characterization of rural African communities over the course of the last century persistently seeking to evade or erode the authority of powerful institutions over their lives (European empires, neoliberal development, the local nation-state) seem far less interested in or prepared to accept a similarly skeptical or evasive characterization of government as the enemy if they come across it in a small town in the interior west of the United States. When I try to explain to liberal friends and colleagues why I think we ought to be more anthropologically and politically curious and even accepting about grassroots hostility to government or the state in American society, as well as other societies around the world, it is often a struggle. The monitor fumed (I remember her glaring across the room at him with a stare that would burn a hole through metal) but since she’d assumed the power to compel eating on her own, she had no basis to tell the custodian that he couldn’t do it. So from then on, we ate what we were inclined to eat, as long as we were smart enough to go to the custodian on the way out.
I think he was getting tired of having to scrape patties off the underside of the tables. We found out that the lard-coated burgers would stick to the underside of the table, and then you could go ahead and eat the reasonably edible bun.įor this reason, about halfway through the year, the custodian began to give us permission to leave even if we hadn’t completely cleaned off our plates. If you had a little plastic baggie in your backpack, you could scoop the green beans or other wretched vegetable into the baggie and smuggle them out for disposal. Eventually, a lot of us figured out tricks to get out of eating the soggy, swimming-in-liquid canned cold green beans or the lard-coated burgers. I still remember the hamburgers, which came served with a coating of congealed lard on both sides of the patty. If you hadn’t, you weren’t allowed to leave the cafeteria. (I found out later that she had come to this conclusion completely on her own: it wasn’t her assigned duty.) If you bought a meal from the school, you had to show your tray to the monitor, in order to prove that you had eaten everything.
But she decided that it was her job to ensure that all kids ate properly. When I was in first grade, there was a woman hired by the school to assist kids in the cafeteria.
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