Session: #635

Theme & Session Format

Theme:
The archaeology of material culture, bodies and landscapes
Session format:
Session, made up of a combination of papers, max. 15 minutes each

Title & Content

Title:
Creating foodscapes in colonial and imperial contexts: food, cuisines and food environments in glocal perspectives
Content:
Colonial and Imperial contexts are especially dynamic arenas generative of new subsistence environments, cuisines, and foodways. Born of multiple and fragmentary experiences of migration and displacement that remain entangled in broader scale networks and relations, these contexts were particularly active in the production of new and/or expanded “Foodscapes.”
Foodscape, a term derived from Appadurai’s concept of “scapes,” is defined as the physical, social and cultural spaces and processes that mediate the interactions between people, food, technology, values and material culture related to subsistence and eating. This concept highlights how culinary communities, and communities of consumption, including the social and material environments they are embedded in, emerge and are transformed in a dynamic, and fluid manner, albeit in particular places/spaces, variably influenced by their “global” connections, and engagements with other places and their foodscapes. This perspective allows for more complicated readings of food, cooking and food environments in colonial contexts, beyond dominant narratives of culinary practice, and consumption as nostalgic identity expression/self-identification practices or as the product of domination(change)/resistance(continuity).
This session explores persistence, innovation, transformation and hybridizations of and in food environments, cuisines, and foodways in colonial, imperial and diasporic contexts characterized by their connectivity to other places and the mobility and flows of people, practices, knowledge and material culture between them. This session works from an expansive geographic and temporal perspective that incorporates archaeological case studies from ancient to modern contexts.   
Keywords:
Foodways, Cuisines, Food-Environments, Colonialism, Globalization
Session associated with MERC:
no
Session associated with CIfA:
no
Session associated with SAfA:
no

Organisers

Main organiser:
Dr Ana Delgado Hervás (Spain) 1
Co-organisers:
Dr Meritxell Ferrer Martín (Spain) 1
Dr Guido Pezzarossi (United States) 2
Affiliations:
1. Universitat Pompeu Fabra
2. Syracuse University