Paper short abstract:

Responding to calls for historicity within current anthropological work on crisis, this paper focuses on experiences of political economic change within Britain in two recent eras of conservative rule: Thatcherism and austerity, from the perspective of members of a grassroots food co-op

Paper long abstract:

Responding to calls for historicity within current anthropological work on crisis (see for e.g. Henig & Knight 2023), this paper focuses on experiences of political economic change within Britain in two recent eras of conservative rule: Thatcherism and austerity. It builds on almost two years of fieldwork with a grassroots food cooperative in London, which took place from 2015-17 at a time when post-financial crisis austerity was significantly impacting on many people’s lives in Britain. The food co-op itself started in the late 1980s at a time of growing interest in anarchism and non-hierarchical organising, in response to Thatcherism and the crisis of the political left after the Cold War. The paper draws on interviews conducted with past and present members of the food co-op to explore the national, political-economic environment in which multiple crises were playing out in these two eras, how these were experienced on the ground, and the forms of affective charge they held for those involved within the food co-ops, as well as the forms of action (and inaction) that they fostered. Building on approaches to crisis that move away from notions of rupture, towards chronicity and endemic imbalance, it is attentive to the kinds of ‘action and meaning’ (Vigh 2008: 5) that these different phases of neoliberal policy making and politics within Britain have fostered.