Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to explore the role of food and hospitality in the processes of homemaking. Through the lens of liminality, the analysis will capture the generative and creative responses inside context of temporary dwelling.

Paper long abstract:

This work is bases on a seven-months research experience inside a semi-institutional refugee house, located in the northern Italy countryside. The paper will explore the role of food and hospitality in the process of homemaking inside contexts of temporary dwelling. In particular, the analysis will switch from a vision of fixed, static, and marginalized limbo to a liminal perspective (Brun and Fabòs 2015) which enables to capture transformations, creative responses, and agency processes. Despite living in a temporary structure, the young refugees I used to visit were always pointing out “if you bring food to our home, we are not going to let you enter, here we want to offer you our food.” These insight on food and hospitality presents a fluid and dynamic understanding of home through different dimensions: offering food and drinks is crucial to switch from being a guest to become a host, which not only restores an imbalanced relation between giver and taker but also create an intimate, familiar, and routine-based sphere of normality. Sharing food with me and others social workers was a way to reshapes the stereotyped power-based relationships inside reception centers. In a sensorial perspective, the experience of food and the taste of traditional recipes evokes and historical consciousness and a sense of ontological safety. Sharing, offering, allowing culinary contaminations are elements of dynamic and transformative processes where refugees can act, choose, creatively respond, and float inside the refugee’s system and the local community’s context.