Wim Van Daele

Food’s Entanglement with Life: How Is It Good to Work With?’ September 4-7, 2016, Oslo, Norway Organizers: Wim Van Daele and Thomas Eriksen (U. Oslo) Given that food is intimately enmeshed with vastly different aspects of human and more-than-human life, it is an assemblage that is particularly apt to revive an integrative approach countering anthropology’s fragmentation into numerous subfields. Throughout the exploration of human, environmental and planetary health, industrialization of agriculture, neoliberal policy-making, intercultural subjectivities, the food of our food, soils, bacteria, earthworms, national body-politics, and food activism, we have moved forward toward bridging the divisive cleavage between political economy and more-than-human ontological approaches in anthropology. The issues of relations and boundaries in particular were the connective themes of the individual papers, whereby the symposium as a whole deployed food to flesh out different entanglements and boundaries among and between human beings and non-human entities. Food is particularly apt to inspire re-conceptualizations of the dynamics and processes that make, maintain, and unmake these human and more-than-human entanglements and boundaries in terms of ‘cooking,’ ‘eating,’ ‘digesting,’ ‘fermenting,’ ‘vomiting,’ and metabolic processes. As such, food and its related transformative processes become good to work with in accounting for life as it gets enacted in heterogeneous relationships.