The Agency of Eating : Mediation, Food and the Body PDF
Preview The Agency of Eating : Mediation, Food and the Body
The Agency of Eating Contemporary Food Studies: Economy, Culture and Politics Series Editors: David Goodman and Michael K. Goodman ISSN: 2058-1807 This interdisciplinary series represents a significant step toward unifying the study, teaching and research of food studies across the social sciences. The series features authoritative appraisals of core themes, debates and emerging research, written by leading scholars in the field. Each title offers a jargon-free introduction to upper-level undergraduate and postgraduate students in the social sciences and humanities. Kate Cairns and Josée Johnston, Food and Femininity Peter Jackson, Anxious Appetites: Food and Consumer Culture Philip H. Howard, Concentration and Power in the Food System: Who Controls What We Eat? Terry Marsden, Agri-Food and Rural Development: Sustainable Place-Making Emma-Jayne Abbots, The Agency of Eating: Mediation, Food and the Body Further titles forthcoming To Dad, with love, always The Agency of Eating Mediation, Food and the Body Emma-Jayne Abbots Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Contents Acknowledgements Introduction the agency of eating 1 Eating bodies and bodies of eating: Theoretical foundations 2 Eating at home: Kinned, shared and acquired bodies 3 Eating away from home: Displaced and (re)rooted bodies 4 Eating heritage foods: Proximate and distanced bodies 5 Eating ‘Global Food’ and its alternatives: Anxious, obscured and active bodies 6 Eating for self and society: Responsible, acceptable and abject bodies 7 Eating futures: Reflections and directions Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgements Over the course of writing this book I have been blessed with support, encouragement, feedback and friendship from a host of individuals. My foremost thanks go to my ‘co-conspirator’ on the topic of eating, Anna Lavis. An incidental conversation at a Goldsmiths Christmas party has led to a collaboration that has not only produced a conference, two edited collections and a research network, but also has significantly shaped the way I think about food, the body and eating. I am a better academic for our discussions and I worry she is not acknowledged enough in the following pages. Many thanks also to the SOAS Food Studies NKUMI group comprising Harry West, Jakob Klein, Lizzie Hull, Johan Pottier, Anne Murcott, Sami Zubaida and James Staples. Their critical, yet always constructive, comments, insightful questions, and close reading of various chapters helped cohere my thoughts and clarify my writing. I enjoy our lively conversations enormously. Thanks are also due to Ben Coles for commenting on an early stream of consciousness that masqueraded as a draft chapter and for asking me what I meant by eating. By suggesting we co-write the next book, Ben further gave me the motivation to finish this one. I am grateful to Mike Goodman for his input at the development stage, and to David Goodman and an anonymous reviewer for providing comments on the first full draft. In addition, I benefited from feedback from participants at the anthropology and UVBO seminars at the University of Oxford and the indigenous food conference at Humboldt University, Berlin. Part of the book was drafted during a short stay in Oxford and my thanks go particularly to Karin Eli and Stanley Ulijaszek. My thinking on materialities was further informed by two ‘Food Stuffs’ workshops at UWTSD and my gratitude is extended to all the workshop participants and especially to my two co-conveners, Louise Steel and Katharina Zinn. Further thanks are also due to my students, particularly those in the ‘Material Worlds’, ‘Body, Culture and Society’ and ‘Political Anthropology’ modules for their thoughtful questions, feedback on draft chapters, and engaged discussions. UWTSD provided practical support in the form of a two-term sabbatical, as did the RAI/Sutasoma Trust and Wenner Gren Foundation, which funded my doctoral and postdoctoral fieldwork, respectively. The Wenner Gren also funded the later Food Stuffs workshop. At Bloomsbury, Clara Herberg and Jennifer Schmidt have been instrumental in getting this book to press and have been a wonderfully supportive team with which to work. The original ethnography contained in this book would not have been possible without the support, friendship and collaboration of a whole range of individuals in Ecuador, who are too numerous to name individually here. The warmth of the community in Jima and their readiness to open their doors and share their lives with me is beyond compare and I am truly grateful for their hospitality and generosity. Particular thanks go to Maria, Teresa, Marcelo and Zoila, who were my guides through the Cuenca foodscape and who did so much to make me feel at home. My gratitude also extends to the privileged migrants who openly shared their hopes, dreams, fears and experiences with me. Closer to home, my thanks go to Margaret Birt for her never-ceasing support and to David Harries and Philip Brocklehurst for their never-ceasing supply of gin and laughter. And finally, a very special thanks to Gemma, Lizzie, Leonie and Kasia, who are the most beautiful, amazing, creative and inspiring group of women I could ever hope to meet and the best friends anyone could wish for. Introduction the agency of eating This book explores how eating, as an embodied experience, mediates and is mediated by the relationship between food’s matter and meaning. My first aim is to tease out how the human eating body, the material stuff of food, and cultural knowledges about food (and the individuals and institutions who produce such knowledges) all dynamically interplay to shape social understandings of what and how we should – and should not – be eating. I am particularly interested in where power lies in such interactions and how it is enacted in and through bodies: I therefore raise the questions ‘Do eaters absorb knowledges and values about foods as they are eating them?’ ‘Does this bestow authority to those who encourage us to eat certain foods or position themselves as food “experts,” such as food activists, doctors, or even family members?’ and ‘Can eating contest these political relations and produce new knowledge?’ Asking these questions leads me to consider what agency – meaning the power to affect change (Bennett 2010) – looks like in relation to food and eating and I consider ‘Who has agency – the eater or experts?’ ‘Can agency be located in the matter of food itself?’ ‘Is agency to be found in the interactions between eaters, food and knowledge- (makers)?’ ‘Is agency distributed across a food’s network or does it coalesce around certain individuals, institutions or even objects?’ and, most importantly, ‘In what ways can eating be an expression of agency?’ This book can, then, be largely read as addressing the political dynamics and power relations of eating. Incorporating eating bodies, the material stuff of food, and knowledges about food into the same frame leads me to examine how matter and meaning interact, and my second aim is to interrogate how this gets played out in the reality of everyday life. My interest and overall approach to this question is, in part, influenced by the recent turn to ‘new materialisms’ (Coole and Frost 2010; see also Bennett 2007, 2010) and Actor Network Theory (ANT) (Latour 2005; Law and Hassard 2004), in the sense that I am open to the possibility that non-human
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