European Society for Oceanists 2022 Conference

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Session Detail (parallel)

Foodways in Motion

Coordinator(s)

Gabriele Weichart, Anita von Poser, Gaia Cottino, Nancy Pollock

Session presentation

The consumption of food and drink is closely tied to personal experiences and to sociocultural norms and expectations. Psychologists and nutritional scientists have brought forward that food preferences and aversions are based on long-term habits, which are rooted in socialisation. This could lead to the assumption that we are not very flexible with regard to nutrition and taste, and that major changes later in life would be rather unlikely.
Contrary to this argument, there are manifold proofs that peoples and societies have changed their diets, food habits and tastes throughout their lifetimes, forced by the circumstances, voluntarily or even “naturally”. As the consumption of food and drink is not only a sociocultural act but a biological necessity, the physical changes people undergo in their lifecourses require nutritional adaptation. Additionally, there are many other reasons impacting quality, access, and food choices, e.g. when people move to countries with different culinary traditions and availability of foodstuffs or change their environmental and economic conditions.
Moreover, in the past decade a new critical interest in moana foodscapes has risen, under the idea that eating is not only a biological and sociocultural, but also a political act. Pacific scholars’ contributions to a methodological and epistemological decolonization (Smith 1999; Meyer 1998; Hau’ofa 1993) has in more recent years, supported by further contributions (Dumelat 2015; Heldke 2003; Lewis 2000), spilled over into the food arena. In this material and symbolic space moana stomachs have been described as “colonial subjects” (Craig Santos Perez 2013) undergoing complex and overlapping neo/colonial gastronomic impositions, a phenomenon also known as gastro-colonialism.
Questions of political taste are therefore emerging, which address the “digestional genealogies” (Santos Perez 2017) and colonial legacies in the foodscapes of Oceania and which search for past, present, and future relations (Strathern 2020).

In this panel, we explore foodways in motion – on an individual, societal, and political level – and thus call upon multiple and entangled im/material networks that act for a de-colonization of imperial gastronomic impositions through the consumption of local foods while developing critical discourses on food sovereignty, nutrition, wellbeing, and body size in contemporary Oceania.

Paper submissions are closed

Accepted papers

Tastes and tasting. Early missionary wives’ learning and sharing of foodstuffs in oceania

Deborah Pope (EHESS - Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales)

When the first group of London Missionary Society missionaries, including five married couples, disembarked on Tahiti in 1797, one of their first concerns was how to find sufficient and wholesome food in a remote, isolated land and among a people of an alien, often challenging culture. This paper will explore their efforts not only to obtain adequate provisions but also to learn from the indigenous population in this sphere while attempting to introduce new foodstuffs perhaps more in line with their European tastes and way of living than with those of the Polynesians around them. Particular attention will be paid to the role of missionary wives in this enterprise for, as those mainly responsible for the domestic world and thus the material question of food and its provision and with the added responsibility of being the prime movers in the “civilizing” aspect of the evangelical mission, theirs was a crucial position. The successful fulfillment of their role as purveyors of the food on which the well-being and health of the whole missionary community depended entailed these women adapting to local foods while their perceived role as “civilizers” led them to attempt to introduce new tastes and ways of eating to the indigenous population. To evidence these efforts we shall be looking both at missionary documents of the day and contemporary life in these islands of Polynesia.

Digesting genealogies: moana networks of gastro-decolonization

Gaia Cottino (Università di Genova)

Despite moana stomachs have been described as “colonial subjects” having suffered and still suffering a gastronomic colonization, their agentive capacity to “bite back” (Fresno Calleja 2017) is very well proven by the foodways and staple cultural selection put into place in history, as well as by the contemporary critical food movements and networks.
Among the networks acting for a “rediscover” of a pan-pacific and sovereign gastronomy of Oceania, is the TV show Pacific Islands Food Revolution. The show is subtly channeling a message of liberation from the gastronomic smallness state of mind as well as of culinary autonomy, (re)inventing a cross-cultural continuity between the participating islands (Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, Vanuatu). Such a strong political message of food autonomy and sovereignty seems to have drawn its nourishment from the scholars of Oceania and to have precipitate into the grassroots discourse of the contestants. In search for relations in both directions -in front into the “digestional genealogies” (Santos Perez 2017) and back into the future of the current foodscapes- this show reveals the power of the network to critically discuss crucial issues for the future of the islands and to share them through the amplifying means of the TV.
The paper analyzes the political gastro-decolonization message sitting in between the lines of the show, as well as the narrative of the participants in order to question which impact and local strategies the show could trigger

Decolonial diets. Practicing rangatiratanga and kaitiakitanga at the dinner table

Federica Pieristè (Sapienza Università di Roma)

Over the past few decades, numerous societal changes have happened in Aotearoa-New Zealand, driven by a precise and clearly stated decolonising intent. Countless movements have risen from below to fight for the recognition and validation of Māori identity, language, political and human rights.
Amongst this abundance of social transformations, there is one that has been perhaps overlooked and underestimated, due to its domestic and intimate nature: the shift in diet and food choices. In fact, an increasing number of Māori people today is advocating for a change in food consumption and sourcing. This quest for mindful food practices takes on different forms, from the adoption of a vegan or vegetarian diet, to the revival of “traditional” foods and community gardens.
The aim of this paper is to address the motivations behind these food advocacy movements (both formal and informal), looking at the way that political statements, identity claims, ethical stances, and health questions overlap and intersect, generating a complex and dynamic contemporary foodscape. Following a one year long netnography and six months of online ethnography, this research shows that crucial questions of rangatiratanga (self-determination), hauora (wellbeing) and kaitiakitanga (guardianship) emerge from the discourses around food and supports the thesis that decolonization and indigenous identity are actively forged by Māori people through the daily act of food consumption.

Shifting Gardens, Circulating Food and Metabolising Relations in Tanna, Vanuatu

Jean Mitchell (University of Prince Edward Island)

Growing food in shifting and inspirited gardens has long been a signature practice of Oceanic societies that defied the colonial logic of plantation economies and the codification of “native” resistance to plantations as insolence or failure to thrive in ‘modern’ economies. In this presentation on food gardens, I draw on research undertaken in Tanna, Vanuatu (2016-2018) with the late Jacob Kapere, Emily Niras and a group of young people. This “Ecologies of Care” project aimed to understand postcolonial food gardens and to animate the reportedly waning interest of young people in growing food. We were interested in the kinds of food plants grown, how they were grown, consumed and circulated in communities, on the island and beyond. We learned that while “the Magic Gardens” of Tanna (Bonnemaison 1991) are changing, they are still multispecies sites where gardeners and a constellation of species and beings make vital gardens. The relationalities embedded and sustained in growing, eating, and sharing food in Tanna are "metabolic engagements," (Mol, 2021:3) among humans and food plants. Gardeners routinely explained that they eat their food plants, feed others, send food off-island, sell food and participate in exchange ceremonies that make and remake social relations. Gardens, especially yam, offer protective relations to other species, allow islanders to transit between economies and to challenge the neo-liberal logic reshaping Islanders’ labour, land and food.

Uncle S(p)am: Land, Food, and the US Militarization of Guam, 1945 to Today

Anne Perez Hattori (University of Guam)

Spam, the quintessential American canned meat, skyrocketed in popularity and consumption during World War II, serving as a cornerstone of troops’ diets, while also being introduced to locals along the path of war. Guam, as the only piece of American soil that faced wartime occupation, figured heavily on the warpath, with some 200,000 American military personnel stationed on the island during the war’s last year. Thus an important part of Guam’s “digestional genealogies,” as Chamorro poet Craig Santos Perez so eloquently phrased it, includes the story of Spam and war.

Guam consumes Spam at one of the highest per capita rates in the world, and people regularly buy it by the case. Initially distributed as a way to feed the masses of malnourished natives, the story of Spam on Guam represents more than simply food distributed to a starving, war torn population. It is also a story of land and families, of food and health, and of colonialism and culture, beginning with the Japanese occupation of Guam from 1941 to 1945. The history of the war’s effect on the foodways and health status of the Chamorro people gets obscured in ostensibly bigger political and military stories focusing on America’s victory and subsequent rise to global power. This paper examines the war’s transformation of the Chamorro diet and discusses contemporary efforts to encourage healthier eating habits on the island.

"Coffee to go" - from cash crop to lifestyle

Gabriele Weichart (University of Vienna)

The paper presents work in progress, a research project in Indonesia, the largest country in the border zone between Asia and the Pacific with historical and contemporary ties to both neighbouring regions.

The focus of this paper is coffee, a product that has played a significant role in Indonesia’s economic and cultural history for the past 300 years. It was introduced as a cash crop to the archipelago during Dutch colonial rule and until today, more than seventy years after Indonesia has gained its independence, the majority of coffee beans are still exported.

However, new trends in the marketing and consumption of coffee have occurred in the past decade. While for large parts of the population coffee has remained a luxury product to be consumed in small quantities and only on rare occasions, a growing variety of coffee shops of different styles, products, prices and marketing are catering for Indonesia’s middle-classes, who have developed a taste for coffee as part of their modern urban lifestyles. Knowledge of attributes and qualities of coffee beans and their origins, styles of coffee making and serving have become an “art”, a particular habitus that distinguishes the connoisseur from the ordinary consumer.

This paper addresses and discusses the interplay of consumption, taste, gender and sociality in the context of coffee cultures in modern day Indonesia.