Food and Eating Practices as Affirmative Bio-politics on the Border

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Immigration and Refugee Resettlement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In this paper, I will explore the role of provision, preparation, and consumption of food among undocumented border-crossers on the island of Lesvos in Greece. In the various migrant centres run by solidarity groups, cooking and eating become the embodied experiences that bind migrants and solidarians together. Relying on primary archaeological ethnography fieldwork, I will be tackling the following questions: (1) How do the materiality and corporeality of food provision, preparation, and consumption produce time and memory in the various border-crossing contexts?; (2) How do they define and redefine sociality and community, and shape understandings of the border and of the migrant experience?; and (3) What kind of bio-political effects do such material and corporeal phenomena produce, for migrants, solidarity groups, and local communities? Based on the insights gained from the anthropology and archaeology of food, sensoriality, and memory, and on the Deleuzian concept of the "assemblage" (redefined as "sensorial assemblage" – Hamilakis 2017), I will be claiming that food provision, preparation, and consumption on the border operate as affirmative bio-politics (cf. Esposito 2008): as a positive, affective and corporeal/multi-sensorial act of place-making and community-building, as well as an arena for trans-corporeal and trans-cultural flows, and political agency and emancipation.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Archaeologies of Immigration and Refugee Resettlement   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24305