Nested Markets, Land, and Community Building: Reciprocity and Repair with Catholic Worker Farms in the United States

The emergence of territorial and nested markets offers nuance related to scale, place, and actor autonomy (both producer and consumer among others) that bolsters our examinations of rural development and challenges from the margins in agri-food relationships (Ploeg 2014, Schneider, Ploeg, Hebinck 2014). This paper extends previous scholarship on the Catholic Worker movement’s farms (Stock 2010) with particular emphasis on partnerships with Native American tribes to reconceptualize and repair relationships between people, communities, and land. The presentation is based on the farm’s zines and newsletters that illustrate elements of reciprocity, relationship-building, and other less explicitly market behavior of Polayni’s double movement including householding and reciprocity that specifically challenge the idea of the land as resource only. We argue that reciprocity is a key aspect that both illustrates and builds trust, care, and mutual aid and challenges the assumptions about what (non?) economic behavior in agri-food relationships can be like.