Land of the free, home of the brave: Exploring Freedom in America's Unincorporated Communities

The words 'freedom' and 'liberty', for better or worse, seem in some ways have become synonymous with the United States. The very concept enshrined within their constitution through the 'safeguards of liberty', freedom is constructed as a cornerstone of American society. But what does it mean? James Laidlaw notes that "freedom is a concept about which anthropology has had strikingly little to say, noting that anthropological discourse has preferred to focus on 'agency' as "a means of pinpointing whose acts are, to various degrees structurally or transformatively important, or powerful" instead of freedom. To best answer what American freedom is, I propose a multi-sited ethnographic study of three communities in southern California who all attempt to live in communities that are either unincorporated and/or 'off the grid'. These field sites have been deliberately and carefully chosen to act as foils for one another, creating a juxtaposition of political biases and interlocutor backgrounds that should give a more widely applicable argument for what freedom means for these people, as well as indicating what freedom means in America as a whole. The proposed field groups are as follows: 1. Jackrabbit homesteaders in Wonder Valley C.A., 2. Libertarian 'Doomsday Preppers' and survivalists in rural SoCal and 3. residents of Slab City C.A. (a squatter community in the Sonoran Desert). These chosen communities are all in one way or another actively concerned with the concept of freedom and, perhaps, feel the effects and curtailments of American freedom more prominently in their day to day lives because of their precarity, making them interesting case studies to further unpack what freedom means.
My project will trace the path of freedom through the ways in which it is mediated through core anthropological themes such as: space, place, belonging; material culture; economics and reciprocity; nostalgia and memory; and gender, kinship and sexuality. I plan to situate each field site against the backdrop of Southern Californian politics, history, and geographical landscapes. I believe that situating my interlocutors against the backdrop of Californian counter-culture will be essential, with the birth of both Hippie culture and The Beat movement of the 1960s (K.Starr:2007:259-60) alongside the Republican tide of populist, anti-government sentiment "that lifted the political boat of actor and television commentator Ronald Reagan" (Ibid:257) being pertinent to understanding both my interlocuters' lived experiences and understanding why freedom manifests itself the way it does in my fieldsites.