Research

Food is pervasive throughout human life. It is a centripetal force around which a multitude of relations evolve. As such, food informs and mediates a variety of relations ranging from intimate to transnational. Moreover, it mobilizes affects, memories, bodies, discourses and representations, and connects these into domains that have environmental, spiritual, religious, economic, political and social implications. Food is thus generally a tiny thing that mediates nearly all aspects that have bearing on human life and even beyond.

Being so pervasive and total, I aim at transforming food from an object of study into a methodology. In the way language is accepted as a looking glass to culture and society, I explore food as a way to grasp these. Such approach opens up ways for exploring human experiences and different life-worlds that are both within and outside the grasp of language. By way of food it becomes possible to look simultaneously at discourses, representations, narratives as well as affective, sensory and divine experiences that sometimes are evasive to conscious rendering.

From this starting point, I explore the ways in which food is enmeshed with human and non-human life in Sri Lanka. My focus lies particularly on moments of interaction between foods, human beings, and other entities throughout the cultivation, harvest, preparation, and consumption of food, both in the everyday as in ritual events. I have noted so far that in ceremonial forms of cooking, the ritual food becomes an allegorical materialization of the renewal of the world, human beings and their interrelations. This ritual ‘cooking’ of life draws upon and extends the everyday experience and rendering of the mutual constitution of human beings and food. The mutual generation takes place through the digestive process that maintains the health of the person and that transforms food into excrement. Hence cooking of food turns into a ‘cooking’ of life.

The ritual renewal of the world and human beings as mediated by food aims at enhancing the continuation of life as relational. It engages with the precariousness of life, and of the cultivation and procurement of food. The acknowledgement of insecurities in life as mediated by food, is what binds these ritual activities with the work of social movements in Sri Lanka. However, the common ground does lead to very different articulations. Whereas in the former, the delicacies are rendered tangible, pondered, and transformed into life-enhancing activities in a material way (cooking ritual foods), in the latter these are rendered in more abstract rational terms. The abstract argumentative reasoning with regard to food issues is triggered by the national and international scale on which these movements base their critique. Moreover, such form of expression is a requirement of the political field to enter it and to be recognized as a reasoning partner. Hence, I look at the way food embodies these different forms of experiencing, grasping, and dealing with the world and which are the different processes that are entailed in these. As such, I hope to illustrate throughout that food can be both an interesting object of study as well as a methodology.