Paper short abstract:

This paper will analyse food in the context of the Indian Ocean World, with a view to illuminating how the movements of plants, people, material culture and knowledge helped to shape unique culinary cultures and practices across different cities in the Indian Ocean littoral.

Paper long abstract:

Historians and anthropologists have used various frameworks to analyse connectivities, mobilities and cultural exchange in the Indian Ocean World. Port cities as frames of reference hereby help to construct an alternative analytical framework to studies that employ nation-state based models. Simultaneously, scholars from both disciplines have probed how food can be used as an object of inquiry to interrogate connections beyond the category of the local and challenge nation-based arguments. However, these two bodies of literature have rarely spoken to one another.

This paper will analyse food in the context of the Indian Ocean World, with a view to illuminating how the movements of plants, people, material culture and knowledge helped to shape unique culinary cultures and practices across different cities in the Indian Ocean littoral. Furthermore, it aims to complicate scholarship on what might be termed 'colonial food studies' which has focused mostly on the nineteenth century category of nation-state. Using the port city of Penang as an example, this paper considers how food exchanges and the travelling of practices, techniques and recipes in the Indian Ocean World illuminate a multiplicity of connections and movements that transcend the nation state, and centre Asian cooks of various ethnic backgrounds as actors of culinary change and exchange in context of European colonial rule. Following approaches of connected histories in past and present, this paper offers alternative and complementary narratives and histories to this exchange by giving voice to otherwise often neglected actors, such as ethnic minorities, women, and domestic workers.

Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the revaluation of regional and traditional Polish food as a way for the upwardly mobile and educated city dwellers to express status distinction and reimagine their social identity through material culture, discourse, and practices in everyday life in contemporary Poland.

Paper long abstract:

This paper reports from an ongoing ethnographic fieldwork into the revaluation of regional and traditional Polish food as a way for the upwardly mobile and educated city dwellers to express status distinction and reimagine their newly created bourgeois social identity through material culture, discourse, and practices in everyday life in contemporary Poland. This research is based on media analysis, interviews. and observation conducted among Polish chefs, food manufacturers, and consumers. The paper is concerned with the circulation of people, ideas, and things that connect the Polish food landscape with cosmopolitan flavor profiles, images, and values, determining expectations about what ingredients, dishes, and food service in markets, restaurants, and stores should be like. We engage with the forms and strategies of elevation of regional and traditional food, the revaluation or enrichment of customs that allow them to acquire new visibility, as well as the reinterpretation and reimagination of relations to history, space, and nature in food production and artisanal activities. These dynamics are inscribed into social and geographical mobilities within the country and abroad, generating change in the gastronomy field. At the same time, these shifts negotiate cultural and class tensions between the present and an often imagined past, local traditional roots and global futures, as well as the rural and the urban.

Paper short abstract:

This paper maps foodscapes of an upmarket grocery, operating in the heart of Marseille in France's south. How does this stylish food enterprise reflect the volatile history of Marseille's urban fabric, especially at this twentieth-first century moment of people and goods on the move?

Paper long abstract:

This paper draws on established theories of walking as "grounded" practice (de Certeau; Giard), together with recent methodologies for charting geographies of the senses (Springgay and Truman), to explore an intimate site of material culture. Epicerie l'idéal is a small, stylish grocery, positioned in one of the gentrifying streets encircling a north African/mediterranean food market, operating in the heart of Marseille in France's south. The paper invites readers to "walk" the épicerie as symptomatic of the quartier's renovation - to trace mobilities of diverse communities and culinary cultures at this twentieth-first century moment of people and goods on the move. As a conceptual guide for this "walking", we map a number of different routes. Firstly, we browse products on the shelves as narratives of remembered and imagined gastronomic pleasure, and as signifiers of cosmopolitan cultures; for the second route, we piece together the life story of the épicerie's owner - its materiality in olives, wines, oils and cheeses, and the emotional networks and sensual politics needed to sustain this life; for the final route, we situate the épicerie in the volatile history of Marseille's urban fabric, together with continuing debate of the commodification of ethnic cultures by "foodies" (Johnston and Baumann). Does the nearby fresh food market present a rebuke to the aesthetically arranged contents of Epicerie l'idéal or does the viscerality of an "embedded" history provide possibilities for a different reading: a reading beyond one of port city gentrification and the inevitability of its losses?

Paper short abstract:

Drawing from a recent ethnography carried out in the Western Alps of Italy, the contribution will intersect the ecological space with the contemporary spatial re-appropriation through the means of food of different genres of migrants, namely Italian urban dwellers and refugees.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing from a recent ethnography carried out in the Western Alps of Italy, the contribution will intersect the ecological space -its' gastronomic history marked by a switch from being a hinge between Italy and France (receiving, exchanging, spreading and taming staples) to being a peripheral barrier as a consequence of a city-centered modern gaze triggering a heavy depopulation in the mid XX century, with the contemporary spatial re-appropriation through the means of food of different genres of migrants, namely Italian urban dwellers and refugees. If these last, relocated in highlands' extraordinary reception centers (C.A.S.) after disembarking in Lampedusa, guarantee the success of the Italians' migration project to rural mountainous areas by becoming labor for agri-tourisms and niche market production, the synergy of the two (not devoid of criticisms) contributes to the local communities' revival of memories and the re-invention of traditional gastronomies , in a circle of inter-relation.

The here proposed contribution will therefore tackle the tensions and resistances in the contemporary unprecedented social composition of the Western Alps through the example of the contended "patata di montagna" (lit. the mountain potato). The alpine potatoes, like its' human communities, can exemplify, practically and symbolically, the intersection between mobility, appropriation, circulation, memories, domesticity, belonging and nourishment.

Paper short abstract:

This paper, based on fieldwork performed in South West France within the frame of the ongoing European project called Food2gather, questions the role of food in the articulation of relations between migrant populations and members of majority societies, and as a tool for integration.

Paper long abstract:

The current reception conditions of asylum seekers and immigrants raise major political controversies and sociocultural concerns. In opposition to nationalisms that demand the closing of frontiers, citizens in several countries get organized around projects to support migrants. Food occupies a prominent place in many of these initiatives (refugee food festivals, cooking workshops, community gardens, food aid, shared meals, ethnic food and music events). This paper examines the role of food in the articulation of relations between migrant populations and members of the majority society in the public space, with cases in the Bordeaux metropolis and rural communities in the Gironde. The centrality of food in these enterprises gives shape to new solidarities and ideas about citizenship in our globally connected societies. Through an analysis of civic engagement at the intersection of food, migration and the public space, this paper will also examine how migrants, refugees and civil associations make use of food as a relational resource and how such initiatives foster civic engagement and mutual intercultural knowledge. While highlighting notions of identity, belonging and adaptation, the issue of integration will be discussed.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the cultural and social role of food practices and habits in the re-affirmation of migrants' identities with particular reference to the sub-Saharan African communities in the city of Naples, investigating the multifaceted dynamics of inclusion/exclusion related to food.

Paper long abstract:

My presentation aims at investigating the role of food practices and habits in the processes of construction of migrants' subjectivity and sociality. I will present preliminary results of my fieldwork in the city of Naples, in Southern Italy, where I am conducting ethnographic research among some sub-Saharan African communities.

From the hawkers' selling of African street food to the "traditional" food dishes offered by the African restaurants, food appears to be one of the crucial elements in the process of (re)affirmation of individual and collective identities. It contributes to create the idea and the sense of community for several reasons: from the "multisensory" redefinition of the urban space that migrants' food practices allow to the creation of places of food consumption and sharing. These last are spaces that strongly contribute to migrants' homemaking process. Although food can be a source of inclusion for migrants, since it fosters relations among them, it can also determine (self)exclusion, towards and within the host country but also among different migrants' communities (Abbots 2016). Finally, in a gendered perspective, migrants' food acts as a powerful instrument for women's sense of self-recognition in the new environment, in private (domestic) as well as in public space. Through food, women largely contribute in their family economy while their role as "upholders of traditional culture" is reproduced and reaffirmed through it, allowing, in the meantime, the creation of a larger sense of family and, in a greatest perspective, of community.

Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on Dutch and Belgian converts doing hijra (Islamic migration) to Morocco. Not having to worry about halal food was envisioned a key benefit of their migration. Yet, once in Morocco, food gets surrounded with paradoxes. I argue that the converts perform Europeanness through food.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on food practices among white Dutch and Belgian converts who have made hijra (Islamic migration) to Morocco. I argue that the converts perform 'Europeanness' through food, resulting in a mixed Euro/Moroccan food culture. Expecting simple access to a halal diet as an important benefit of living in a Muslim majority country, the converts find a perplexing reality. On the one hand, they tend to embrace, even idealize, Moroccan cooking and eating habits. The traditional Moroccan marketplace (souq) for example, is incorporated in white upper-class hipster culture narratives of climate consciousness, organic eating, alongside reverence for the Prophet (sunnah). At the same time, the quality of particular ingredients, shortage of European products, and different hygiene standards can be a source of frustration. Disillusionment and home-sickness can be met with attempts to get a hold of European products and ingredients to create familiar dishes. Others set up restaurants, and businesses dealing in European foods. Whether positive of negative, local food practices are often assessed in reference to Islamic ethics. I reference the work of Ann Stoler (2002) on class, race, and imperialism and particularly her notion of the 'sensory nature of memory' to examine how the privileged position 'white' converts had in the West, (Özüyrek 2014, Galonnier 2015, Roozen-Soltar 2012) plays out after their migration to Morocco, a country with a colonial past.