Anthropology of Nutrition: From Fieldwork and Kitchen to Identity Factor

Abstract (English)

Nowadays, the anthropology of nutrition has confidently turned into an independent mega-discipline, since the subject of its research is directly related to a person’s physical health and positive ethnic self-perception - the most important indicators of the well-being and happiness of both an individual and small communities and entire nations.
The range of the scientific questions is unusually broad – for example, the study of traditional-ethnographic “traits” of food (its ritual, ceremonial nature, confessional marking as a feature of traditional culture); the communicative functions of alimentary artifacts outlined by Levi-Strauss and the role of food as a language in general (Lévi-Strauss 2008); the formation of foodscapes – globalization and post-globalization “typical food landscapes” described by anthropologist A. Appadurai (1996: 32); manifestations of gastronationalism (DeSoucey 2010) and the “political” coloring of cuisine (Montanari 2021) as a sign of self-identification of communities and a “tool” of state practices and strategies; food as a determinant of consolidation/separation of “ours” and “others”, “locals” and “newcomers” in the context of migration studies, and most importantly – the increasingly prominent function of food as a factor in the formation and maintenance of collective ethnic, national, and cultural identity. Nowadays, researchers “are increasingly less likely to perceive food solely as biofuel for our bodies, but are reading and interpreting it in social, political, historical, philosophical, and religious dimensions” (Colas et al. 2018: 2).
The aim of the panel is to draw the attention of researchers to traditional cuisine as the marker of ethnic and national identity and the “quintessence” of the alimentary and, more broadly, material culture of a particular community, its most conservative and stable element, since in the area of food, ethnographic specificity is preserved incomparably longer than in other areas of material culture, for example, in clothing and housing.