Here under the Cover. An Anthropology of Food.

Synaesthesia (Sutton, 2001), a term used in anthropology of food for the capacities of food to evoke the past in its sensual totality, finds its use in the situation of migration. Migration as a geographical and cultural displacement leaves the country of origin behind. Country of origin becomes the past, its food can be used for evocation of this past experiences subsumed under the notion of home. Evocation of home through the medium of food helps to patch the discontinuites arising from displacement. The memory of home operates as filter through which new circumstances, beliefs and values are experienced and viewed. Taste and eating habits as a part of habitus, mundane taken-for-granted world, yet embodied part of beliefs and cultural norms, are resistant to suspicion that our perception of it might be subject to our interpretation and can play an active role as confirmation of our beliefs about self and Others, and cosequently as the legitimation of action. Moreover, contextuality of food and eating habits (Appadurai, 1988) allows to place cultural difference in the private contexts and does not interpede the proces of integration into the host society. In combination with its mundane taken-for-granted qualities food serves as an ideal material to pass on the cultural difference over the..