Paper short abstract:

Emerging from reflections on the methodological approach embraced during fieldwork investigations in rural Tunisia, the paper addresses how maintaining food as an unfolding process, powerful to delineate social change, remains a pillar on which food anthropology as a sub-discipline still stands.

Paper long abstract:

This paper demonstrates that upholding food as an unfolding process, making of it the ethnographic locus of analysis, remains a central methodological avenue sketching the contours of food anthropology as a sub-discipline. The material presented emerges from reflections surrounding the methodological approach I embraced during the months of fieldwork investigations observing and participating in the multiple social lives of food in Tunisia. I seek to show how surveying the different social spaces in which food (cereals) made its appearance and became relevant to people’s lives reveals much about people and the relations between them and the world, adding to the body of literature highlighting the potency of food as a window to investigate social change. Further the paper details how the approach allowed the analysis to engage with some of the most prominent anthropological debates, contributing to the many works attentive to the ethical breadth of human life. Showing the complexity of people’s everyday ethical navigations around their food affairs, the material unfolds how the analysis was built around the observation of everyday food as a locus of both material and existential quests in my informants’ lives. In other words, led by observing people’s struggles around producing, processing, trading and consuming food, I discuss the process through which in the analysis the inherent relations between food as a means of social reproduction and people’s claims for better inclusion in their society emerged, bringing to light much of my informants’ ideas about a life worth living in post-revolutionary Tunisia.