Food relationships

Power and agency in the asylum seekers’ reception centers of the Cuneo valleys

Abstract

The article analyzes the food practices within the reception centers (CAS) located into the Italian western Alps. From this observation emerges that food is, on the one side, an institutional tool to control the asylum seekers bodies and, on the other, an arena of resistance and agency. Structured into four sections, it tackles the theoretical distinctions between food and anti-food, in order to analyze, through ethnographic data collected between 2018 and 2019 in the Gesso, Stura, Grana e Maira valleys, the food of the power and the power of food: in this field occur, at the same time, “civilizing” actions of control and re-education and of contrast and emancipation. The food manipulation, the culinary actions and the exercise of a food sovereignty are instrumentally used to contrast the food regime, the nutritional guidelines and the restrictions to food quality, imposed by the reception institutions. It is feeding the food relationships through gustative mediations, totemic ingredients, culinary pairings, culturally appropriate eating patterns and socially shared combinations of food that asylum seekers daily claim their presence standing against the disciplining and controlling power of the CAS. The culinary action reveals the extent to which citizenship can be played on fields less explicit than the direct political action.