Consuming Our Pasts: Food as Nature and Culture

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Thinking about Eating: Theorizing Foodways in Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Taking inspiration from post-humanist theory, I frame my work about human life both past and present in a way that attempts to avoid traditional concretized definitions of humanity and culture that envision these subjects as separate from nature or the environment. Post-humanists view humanity as only part of a much bigger and richer montage that makes up the world, life, and our interconnected being. This perspective allows us to explore the past in compelling ways. While food-focused archaeologists have long argued that food is much more than sustenance or calories, if we go a step further and envision nature from a perspective that assumes dimensions of a live essence and active intricate existences, rather than something to be mastered or dominated, our understanding and appreciation of these complex relationships may deepen. Four central concepts provide the foundation for my efforts to flesh out these connections. These principles are human-nonhuman relationships, terroir, materiality, and health (or well-being). Using this framework and multiple lines of evidence drawn from nearly two decades of field research in the Fiji Islands I am working to grasp the subtle manner in which human identities, experiences, foodways, and nature connect and comingled in the past.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Thinking about Eating: Theorizing Foodways in Archaeology

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32963