Paper short abstract:

Activities like that of eating, are a repeated everyday practice. Throughout time, in every culture, people have consumed either traditional or modern meals, individually or in a group, in or out. Moreover, they have reworked and reshaped such activities, which I am going to explore in this paper.

Paper long abstract:

Everyday life happens ongoingly around us in an unstoppable flow of events, processes and things of different affordances and properties. One of most repeated practices in our everyday routine is the habit of eating, which is a fundamental social activity of creating and cementing relationships. The focus of this paper lies on the repetitive practices of eating/having a meal by Albanian families and individuals in Prishtina/Kosova, especially after the war (1998-1999). It is necessary to point out that Kosovans have undergone enormous political and social changes in general since the war that have directly impacted their everyday life, consequently not only the social life has been transformed, but routines have been changed, reinvented, and reshaped along with it too. Taking this into account, it is in my interest to observe everyday practices such as: cooking traditional or modern cuisine, sitting by (fixed) places around the dining table, serving food, having the basic or the grandest breakfast, lunch/dinner alone, with friends or family members, having a conversation or just eating, etc. For further explanation and deeper analysis, I raise the following questions: How has the social practice of eating returned to everyday routines after the war of 1998-99 in Kosovo? How (and what) gets cooked, eaten, and served in dining rooms in Kosovo? How do Kosovans rework cultural differences during meals?

To address the above-mentioned questions, this research requires to be qualitatively approached; therefore, the mostly used research-methods will be ethnography, ethnographic field notes, participant observation, and interviews.