The coming community. The politics of alternative food networks in Southern Italy

Sociologists and political scientists suggest that community is increasingly lacking in contemporary life. At the same time, consumer researchers have long suggested that brands and commodities can act as a source of community and ethics. In recent years a number of communitarian productive networks have emerged in sectors like food, software, fashion, design and social enterprise. Such communities of commons-based peer production have transformed the role of consumer communities by making communitarian relations count also in the material production of goods and services. In this paper we examine the ‘neorural’ communitarian networks located in Southern Italy. We suggest that the creation of community around high quality, ‘authentic’ agricultural produce serves a dual role. On the one hand such communities singularise agricultural products and enable them to acquire market value as goods. At the same time, communities provide space for a new politics of things oriented towards pragmatic social transformation and the creation of ontological security in a world understood to be highly contingent.