UC Santa Cruz professor shares 'compassion' at anthropology winter lecture series

Dr. Melissa Caldwell, professor of anthropology at the University of California-Santa Cruz, recently visited Wayne State to discuss her ethnographic research she's been conducting in Russia for over 20 years.

Caldwell was the first speaker of the Department of Anthropology's Winter Lecture Series, titled "Compassion, Morality and Ethics," at the Bernath Auditorium on Jan. 18. The lecture series is part of the department's Anthropology of the City initiative.

The next talk, titled "Theory and Method Matters: Finding the Right Combination," will be presented by Dr. Deborah Padgett, New York University professor of social work and global public health, from 2-4 p.m. at the Spencer M. Partrich Auditorium on Feb. 15.

"It was nice to come to [Wayne State] where I know that questions around social justice and diversity are really important issues, especially because my work touches on those things," Caldwell said. "It was nice to have that kind of audience."

In her lecture, titled "Moscow's Compassion City: Building a Faith-Based Civil Society in an Urban Metropolis," Caldwell shared her fieldwork which explored the themes of charity, assistance and compassion in post-socialist Russia.

With the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia adopted neo-liberal economic reforms in the 1990s, which closed all official state-sponsored social welfare programs and created a gap in social welfare provision, Caldwell said in her lecture.

Religious congregations and denominational development organizations in Moscow were the first and most active groups to fill this void. Charity, however, became something more than a moral quality, Caldwell said. "Compassion and kindness were becoming part of a business market in Russia," Caldwell said.

With her research, she concluded that volunteer activities and charitable ventures were becoming lucrative opportunities for a brand new cohort of entrepreneurs and businesses. Organizations that were deliberately transforming assistance into what Caldwell calls "a very robust 'compassion economy' that had its own producers, distributers, consumers, currency, and opportunities for revenue, profitability and growth."

Caldwell said that, by returning to Moscow every year to conduct fieldwork, she was able to actually watch a community change over the course of 20 years.

"And that really made a difference on how I thought about these issues," she said. Her ethnographic research on Russia can be read in her latest book, titled "Living Faithfully in an Unjust World" (University of California Press, October 2016). Caldwell, who is also editor of the critical food studies journal, Gastronomica, concluded her Michigan trip with a visit to Zingerman's Cornman Farms in Dexter, MI on Jan. 19 and 20, where the farm's executive chef Kieron Hales is to become a research subject for on food hacking.

Caldwell's research on food hacking explores alternative, new technologies around food, she explained, along with disruptive food innovation and people simply playing with foods.

"One of the principles of hacking is experimentation and innovation can come from anywhere, so nobody is an expert authority whoever happens to come together in a room and play together and something emerges out of that," she explained, is what food hacking is all about.

Although she said the impetus for the Zingerman's Cornman Farms visit was to attend a dinner hosted by SLICE Ann Arbor, an arts and culture magazine that featured her work with Gastronomica last year, she discovered that Chef Hales has been using ideas from the hacking world to implement new procedures and new ways of cooking to create a unique experience at the farm's restaurant.

Chef Hales has been working to create a less vertical structure of authority in the restaurant, Caldwell said, where everybody's equal and anybody can come up with an idea and rethink how to plate something or create a new recipe.

She also pointed out that ownership of an idea or a recipe in the world of food hacking doesn't exist to any one person. Instead, the food creation or innovation becomes a group product, credited to all the cooks in the kitchen.