Abstract
What happens to our academic writing when we are invited by our interactants to realize that what is serious for a situated set of practices might not be as serious for another set of practices? In this article I explore such situations by considering the relations among eaters, ecologies and the circulation of different types of food in the context of ontological pluralism in Southern Chile. Inspired by debates on eating and subjectivities coming from empirical philosophy, as well as by theorizations on how to take others’ worlds seriously offered by ‘the ontological turn’ in anthropology, I explore how ethnographic situations related to eating and to foods transform epistemological distances between subjects and objects. More specifically, I show how taking our interactants seriously may lead us to eat our academic wor(l)ds, making room for unexpected ethnographic transactions emerging beyond ethnographic theorization.
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Notes
For acute reflections about ‘taking the world of the other seriously’ as the quintessential anthropological move, see Viveiros de Castro (2003, 2011), and the contributions by Candea (2011) and Jensen (2011) in the symposium entitled ‘Comparative relativism’.
For a proposal of ethnography as an art of humorous seriousness, see Jensen (forthcoming).
This discussion is based on fieldwork I have carried out in Southern Chile within the district of Alto Bío Bío during the past 6 years. During the past 20 years, the multinational company ENDESA (National Energy Enterprise), a former state enterprise that was privatized during the military dictatorship and is currently owned by a Spanish-Italian corporation, built two hydroelectric dams, Pangue and Ralko, on the Bío Bío River with government approval. This involved the controversial displacement and resettlement of nearly 100 families from their ancestral lands, people who now live in extreme conditions of vulnerability and social exclusion (Gonzáles-Parra and Simon, 2008).
For further elaboration of indigenous theories of emplacement in Southern Chile and the notion of tuwun, a term roughly translatable as place of origin, see Di Giminiani (2015).
For a general description of the relationship between eating good food and having good blood among the Mapuche, see Gonzalez Galvez (2012). For further accounts on the relevance that food from the land has for shamans, see Bacigalupo (2007).
My host Pedro used to joke about evangelical promises related to the salvation of the body as matter. He used to laugh and say that they were nonsensical statements, since there was no question that the am lives forever, whereas the püllü belongs to and remains in the earth.
Fausto (2008), from whom I took inspiration, has already analyzed this statement in relation to Amerindian notions of ownership.
For a classic anthropological reflection on food and reciprocity, see Sahlins (1974).
I am using the terms intensive and extensive in the sense of Deleuze’s (1994) conceptual distinction. Broadly speaking, extensive differences such as area, length or volume are intrinsically divisible. Conversely, intensive differences refer to properties such as pressure or temperature that cannot be divided as such. Intensive distance, then, is defined by an indivisible intensity rather than an extensive space prone to being measured in Euclidian terms.
I will take distance from these ideas proposed by Magnus Course in the next section of this article, as they might be considered part of the cosmological capture I will try to problematize.
For a philosophical analysis of this idea, see Deleuze (1994).
The prefix -re is usually used to point out the real status of something. In this context, the joke highlights the idea that Jaqueline is a ‘true Mapuche’.
There is no space here to tell the entire history of the communities of Alto Bío Bío, where I have worked over the past 6 years, but it should be noted that these communities have been decimated by, among other factors, the violent effects of the timber industry since the mid-twentieth century and, in more recent years, the construction of hydroelectric dams. The dams were built by energy companies that exploit the region’s natural resources at high cost to the indigenous populations. During the construction of the dams, over 100 Mapuche families were displaced from their ancestral lands and resettled elsewhere. These families now live in conditions of extreme vulnerability and social exclusion (Gonzáles-Parra and Simon, 2008).
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Acknowledgements
I dedicate this article to Annemarie Mol. I am truly grateful for her intellectual guidance, academic inspiration and unlimited passion regarding eating practices. I am grateful to Filippo Bertoni, Jaqueline Caniguan, Magnus Course, Casper Bruun Jensen and Jeltsje Stobbe for their thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this article. I am also grateful to two anonymous Subjectivity reviewers for providing me with constructive advice. This article was written thanks to an ERC grant (AdG09 Nr.249397), the research project ‘The Eating Body in Western Practice and Theory’, and thanks to support from the Interdisciplinary Center for Intercultural and Indigenous Studies – ICIIS, Conicyt/Fondap/15110006.
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Bonelli, C. Eating one’s worlds: On foods, metabolic writing and ethnographic humor. Subjectivity 8, 181–200 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2015.7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2015.7