Olga Trufanova and Julia Herzberg, Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies (UR) (Web)

Time: 04.-06.05.2023
Venue: Regensburg

Panels

• Siberian cannibal: Myths and truths
• The power of agriculture: Body politics of food production
• Culinary diplomacy: Colonial encounters at the table
• Colonial food in ethnographic disource and practice
• Receipts and representations at the intersection of gender, race, and ethnicity

Colonization and exploration of the non-European territories was an inherently bodily experience. Arrival to new lands meant encountering strange climates, nature, and bodies. Those physical differences had to be given a theoretical footing. Food and diet became central arguments to underscore and explain the physical and cultural differences between Europeans and indigenous people, as well as to claim Europeans’ supremacy over the inhabitants of the conquered lands. Indigenous foodways have typically been depicted as inedible, unclean, disgusting, uncivilized and improper for a European body, the maintenance of which became one of the primary imperial concerns. Thus, the physical survival of Europeans on colonial frontiers was tightly intertwined with the preservation of their cultural and religious (most often Christian) identities. Failure to keep colonial difference in place produced concerns about “barbarization”, “going native” and “hybridization” that were believed to endanger colonial regimes and the legitimacy of their claims of physical, cultural and racial supremacy over the colonized bodies.
Notwithstanding the efforts to maintain a dietary distance between newcomers and indigenous people, colonialism inevitably resulted in alteration in diets on both sides. While European foodways were often used as instruments of … read more (Web).