Re-search as re-hearing

From a city garden near Karlsplatz in Vienna.

Re-search

I return to Vienna with this odd mission, to help some people interested in issues of sustainability and food security with their teaching and research by producing non-research video that explores issues around food. I am being essentially invited to meddle.

I had no idea about research when I first came here; I just collected impressions and had thoughts about them. I am not much more advanced now, except I am better about writing things down and keeping photos and videos and in general keeping records, since I now know that important things may seem trivial at first glance and also that thoughts get lost. 

My method, for the bulk of the relevant activity here, is to go to a rural area and do a cluster of interviews with people who are guided by ideas in their farming, food preparation, and food distribution activities. This work reminds me of every real kind of research I have ever done. It is always the same: one hears very similar stories, very similar rationales for actions, over and over again, and it seems important to notice both what keeps coming up and what small differences show up. 

Here’s one example: mostly, people justify their preference for local produce in very contemporary terms. It’s safer, it supports the local economy, the quality and freshness are superior. Occasionally, one hears also about how farms have always been pretty self-sufficient, how that has always been an ideal, and about how the countryside kept the cities alive during the war, about the importance of maintaining a local capacity for producing food. Sometimes, one also hears, in this very prosperous country, the worry, familiar to us in the US, that social security will go bankrupt and that old people will be dependent on their gardens and their gardening skills. 

One thinks initially about coming to understand how new ideas about sustainability and food security have taken root in rural areas. One hears a lot that sounds very contemporary. However, it may be that the key to the success of these ideas is partly that they are not new at all, that they connect to very long-term concerns in Austria.