Projects
DIASPOFOOD
The Central African diaspora in Belgium: A transnational anthropology of food practices, narratives and social relations
The most important sub-Saharan diaspora settled in Belgium comes from the former colonial areas of Congo, Rwanda and Burundi. However, research on this important component (more than 1%) of the Belgian population has remained limited up to now, and focused on a few topics of mostly institutional nature (religion, elites, policies). Based on that acknowledgment of a “blind spot”, the promoters of this project intend to set up an anthropological research on food in the Central African diaspora. Food is endowed with a strong economic and social dimension. It is a rising topic in anthropology since a few decades, much in phase with the growing interest for intimacy, emotions, memory, gender, and bodily practices.
Food culture is a particularly interesting topic in diasporic communities: moving from the home country to the destination area creates a twist between the original diet and a new regime; even the staple food cannot be accessed easily. One should not assume a culturalist position and disregard the capacity of the actors to change their eating practices, but the resilience of food habits is strong. This resilience should be questioned in detail, and related to the system of social relations that food supports. An ethnography of food in the Central African diaspora should raise questions labelled in terms of processes (the changes) and interactions (the exchanges). Despite the innocuous appearance of the topic, it is a most relevant gateway for an in-depth sociocultural analysis of this diaspora, and by proxy, of the African societies this diaspora emanates from.
The study will be divided in different components:
(1) The economy of food. How is “ethnic food” trade organised, at the crossroads of networks in the home country, along transnational links, and in Belgium?
(2) Food and the social construction of everyday life. Who shops, who cooks, who eat with whom; how does all this connect to other daily practices in the household? Such apparently banal questions are key issues to penetrate the intimacy of the diaspora, and reveal how food is indexed to issues of gender, age, generation, and status.
(3) Subjectivities. Food is a very intimate topic, one that relentlessly provides elements for the construction of the self, and resources for agency. It holds a central place in memory making. How do people conceive the relation between the body, health, beauty, and food?
(4) Identity and “groupness”. Food materialises at the same time boundaries, conviviality and togetherness, leading both to internal differentiation, and to relationships between various social groups in Belgium.
(5) Diachronic considerations. What have been the main transformations of food culture along time in the diaspora? How does it appear in biographies?
(6) (Im)materiality. This dimension should pave the way for a collection of tangible and intangible items related to food in the diaspora and in the home countries, with the view to set up a co-created exhibition.
Those topics will all be addressed through collaborative ethnographic research conducted both in Belgium and in Central Africa, engaging the diasporas.