Food as a matter of being : experiential continuity in transnational lives

This chapter is based on the research project “The Transnational Life of Objects: Material Practices of Migrants’ Being and Belonging,” which promotes a broad interest in how objects constitute transnational social spaces established by migrants and by their counterparts who stayed behind. The question of how people make choices, exercise agency and create continuity in conditions of transnational migration is pursued, with the focus on objects and material practices. Deliberations around the meanings of “the taste of home” are plentiful in the intersected fields of food, migration and material culture studies, and tend to focus on identity and memory. Indeed, food can be interpreted as a material expression of belonging, status or family history, or of social and cultural difference. Food can be central to migrants’ creation of places of remembrance or pride, mourning or celebration, privacy or symbolic communion, or economic connection with the relatives who stayed behind. As the negotiation of belonging often entails communication through objects, food parcels are involved in multifaceted quests and attempts to belong. However, by presenting and discussing some ethnographic examples of sensuous aspects of transnational interconnections in situations of physical separation, I promote a complementary approach that centres on the materiality of food and food-related objects and practices