Perishable Politics: Food and the Everyday Sociopolitical Identity

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.

Gastropolitics are the creation and maintenance of social and political relationships through the making and consuming of meals. Archaeology allows us to recover the residues of meals and associated culinary equipment from secure contexts. Foodways data, when integrated with other data classes such as paleodemography and spatial patterning, can help us to differentiate between past social and political relationships. The two main areas in recent gastropolitical studies are the identification of feasting events and the co-occurrence of social status and food remains. I add a third less-often covered area of study, that of quotidian meals, as these have as much to tell us about social, economic, and power relations as feasts do, and are an integral part of gastropolitics. Here I build the case for longitudinal archaeological studies that integrate multiple data classes (quantitative and qualitatively) to understand the role of food in constructing and maintaining social organization, political structure, and group identity.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33332