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Paper short abstract

Disrupting the consumption of food as heritage or entertainment, this project reframes culinary practice through lens of displacement. For Syrian women, foodways function not as identity markers, but as a calculus of survival against the precarity of poverty by rendering a precarious life familiar.

Paper long abstract

This presentation explores how collaborative filmmaking can foster critical imaginaries regarding food and displacement, while simultaneously interrogating the ethical and representational limitations of visualizing precarious lives. Against the backdrop of protracted displacement, Syrians in Turkey inhabit a condition of legal and social liminality where their presence remains contested. Consequently, homemaking transforms from domestic routines into vital strategies for “hanging in” while life is rendered inhabitable every day.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with Syrian families in urban poor neighborhoods of Istanbul and the resulting documentary (Hands of Exile: Making a Home with Foodways), I ask: what do foodways do when home is neither a stable ideal nor a place to belong?

While the anthropology of food often frames culinary practices through the lens of identity and heritage, this project utilizes visual narratives to argue that for Syrian women living under conditions of urban poverty, food emerges not primarily as a nostalgic marker of identity or heritage, but as an everyday calculus of economic and psychological survival, an ongoing effort to render an unfamiliar and unstable environment habitable.

By translating these precarious ecologies of urban poverty into an accessible visual format, Hands of Exile demonstrates how homemaking practices can inform public attention, countering the entertainment value of food media with the visceral realities of subsistence. I argue that collaborative documentary serves as a scalable model for public anthropology by transforming the anthropologist from observer to co-creator, even as it demands we grapple with inherent friction of translating complex ethnography into linear film.