My ethnographic research as a PhD student focused on nature interpretation and water management in the "Other Florida," the name given by Gloria Jahoda, a writer trained in anthropology who moved to Florida in the 1960s, to the rural central Panhandle region surrounding Tallahassee. I was interested in regional identity, ecotourism, anti-development activism, nature interpretation, foodways, and cultural representations and meanings of water bodies, including watersheds, springsheds, rivers, and estuaries. I received my PhD in cultural anthropology from Stanford. A good portion of my dissertation research was collecting oral history interviews for an oral history project, "Naturalists of the Big Bend," archived at the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida. In over forty interviews I sat down with environmentalists, seafood workers, resource users, bureaucrats, educators, and other folks involved with waterscapes, most of the time for two or three hours. There was much wisdom to be gleaned. I must confess, being from Tallahassee, that the whole project was rather personal for me, and it describes a small region of the world I have abiding love for.
Anthropology is the discipline with the longest average dissertations. This is in part because anthropologists have a tendency not just to make arguments from data, but to describe, in sentences rather than numbers, what they encounter in the world. After all, ethnography is many things including a description of particular peoples in particular times and places; it is a nuanced record. I certainly contributed to that cause—my dissertation was a 400-page long field of rabbit hole that I almost never escaped. I would not want anyone to have to go through the slog of reading the darn thing, and some folks probably will not want to get past the title, “The Other Floridas: Ecofeminist Bioregionalism and Post-rural White Identity Politics in the Facebook Era.” I would also not be so bold as to claim it was a particularly well designed project, as it covered enough ground that it had a bit of an exploratory nature up until the very last day. If ethnographies are usually novels, it was really more of a short story collection. However, I can share with you a few key concepts that emerged from my research in The Other Florida, that I have attempted to extract from the muck of impressive academic gobbledygook:
Ecofeminist Bioregionalism: This is the term I used to describe an environmental movement that emerged in Tallahassee in the 1980s, influenced by the ecofeminist nature writers Susan Cerulean, Janisse Ray, and others, and influenced especially by the city’s history of intentional communities and communes. It combined ecofeminism, the movement in the 1980s that sought to link feminism and environmentalism by showing the connections between patriarchy and environmental exploitation, with bioregionalism, a movement that emerged in California in the 70s and sought to create political identities around watersheds. My academic argument was that scholarship on settler environmentalism has not focused enough on the contributions of women, and has missed the decolonizing potential of some movements, such as the ecofeminist bioregionalism movement in the Florida Panhandle.
Multi-sited Nature Interpretation: The “springshed” concept was created in Tallahassee, and I documented how Jim Stevenson’s tours of the Wakulla Springshed employed a multi-sited approach to Freeman Tilden’s method of nature interpretation in order to make the otherwise enigmatic Wakulla Springshed visible.
Multiple Settler Ontologies of the Apalachicola River: “Ontology” was one of the thorny concepts in anthropology during the time when I was a budding anthropologist. The idea basically is that things are multiple, and different folks may encounter different things when they encounter what most scientists would describe as the same thing, such as a mountain. This comes out of many different scholars’ work, including Amazonian anthropology, but I find useful Annemarie Mol’s work showing how a disease in the body is seen differently when doctors use different tests to look for it—it’s multiple. It’s not a single thing that can be pinned down. In anthropology this concept is often used to describe how different indigenous groups may have ontologies in which a mountain is a god, a caribou is a spirit, and so forth. Usually the assumption is that settlers have a scientific, universalist, objectivizing view, that a mountain is a mountain and a caribou is a caribou. My work with advocates for the Apalachicola River suggested this is not always the case, and that some of them experienced the river as a “living whole” permeated with a spiritual “life force” rather than simply a body of flowing water. Therefore, in some contexts there may be multiple settler ontologies.
Panacea Science: I worked as a volunteer at the Rudloe family's Gulf Specimen Marine Lab, which is a singular and beloved institution, and wrote an analysis of how the Lab practices not just outsider science, in the context of an analysis of race, class, and gender dynamics in Panacea, Florida, but an outdoors science in which the lab and aquarium are a porous, dynamic assemblage filled with interspecies affect. More or less, I wrote a description of how Gulf Specimen works using my fancy academic lingo from the multi-species ethnography trend which I was enamored with for a period. At the lab I became fascinated by sea urchins, a fascination also shared by Salvador Dalí, and I even wrote a paper about sea urchins, to give you a sense of how I kept getting distracted.
Nature Interpretation and Zen Buddhism: One of the more interesting observations about the Gulf Lab while I was there was how thanks to the influence of Anne Rudloe it combined the nature interpretation tradition with an influence from Zen Buddhist practice. I also wrote about how the lab performs expertise to highlight scientific value, how the lab induces sea creatures to perform biological wonder in order to increase their social and market value, and how the lab’s practice of harvesting individual specimens protects species as a whole.
The Limits of Egomorphic Identification in Virtual Education Settings: I studied how the lab encourages egomorphic identification with sea creatures, and how this important process works best in unpredictable physical encounters and is difficult to recreate in current virtual education settings.
Memes and Post-Rural White Identity: I was one of the first, if not the first, anthropologist to study the impact of Facebook on the United States political process. At the time I barely knew I was even doing so, because I was stuck deep in the world of the “Facebook Era” just like everybody else. It is of course now quite blasé to say that Facebook’s influence was deleterious, but I collected data on the topic in 2014 and one day, I think someone may be quite happy that I did. I described how the design of social media amplified interpersonally destructive, negative content during the Wakulla Wetlands Referendum campaign in 2014, when some environmentalists were smeared as “Marsh Marxists.” I used the concept of post-rural white identity politics to describe how rural identity was mobilized for political purposes in a suburbanizing county by suburban activists. This is an overlooked dynamic in the US political scene even today, as commentators continue to reify “rural America.” Many social scientists turned their attention to more conservative regions of the United States after the 2016 election and I am proud that I was among a new generation of anthropologists choosing to conduct their first ethnographies in the United States, a decision I made in 2014 when it was very uncommon.
The Mullet Revival: Mullet is the most abundant natural food resource in Florida and is the cheapest seafood. Because of its associations with poverty, the State of Florida for decades tried to “class mullet up,” even going so far in the 1960s as to rechristen it “Lisa” (an effort that was put to an end by a young girl named Lisa from Ocala who wrote a very fiery open letter). I was on the scene of the mullet revival in the Panhandle in the 2010s, when many people were trying to valorize mullet and renew the industry, which collapsed for good after the gill net ban. I analyzed the cultural meanings of mullet and how some folks described it as a “Southern food” and used it to express and establish their identity as poor white Southerners. I focused especially on the symbolic meanings of the “humble mullet” in a Christian context.
I assure you, there were many other rabbit holes. I have moved on from anthropology, but I hope my dissertation will be of use to future ethnographers in the region.
Beyond my dissertation, I was fortunate to participate in the Anthropocene Campus at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in 2014 and contribute to the Anthropocene Curriculum, and to be a Visiting PhD Student at the Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene project. My undergraduate senior thesis was on Chinese state diplomacy and development in Botswana, especially how the Chinese state used philanthropic efforts to promote ping-pong in Botswana in order to promote larger narratives about China’s developmental rise.
My essay about the fiction of Padgett Powell appeared in the Fall 2016 issue of Southern Cultures. My essay about Florida Man was included in Ecocriticism and the Future of Southern Studies.
An essay explaining the influence of local nature writing in returning my scholarly interests to Florida may be found on the Stanford Library website.
The mural at the top of this page was created by Franklin County Middle School and is on display at the FSU Marine Lab.