Food disconnections and reconnections

Intimacy, exclusions and distinctions among refugees from Eritrea

Abstract

In this article I investigate the ways in which refugees from Eritrea try to reinterpret, face and, eventually, overturn some of the conditions of precariousness, exclusion, oppression and violence in which they find themselves, through practices, discourses, senses, emotions, social ties and tastes connected to food. Through a multi-site ethnography of the Eritrean diaspora conducted in different contexts (Ethiopia, Italy, Sweden and the United Kingdom), I explore the role that food, smells and culinary knowledge play both in building refugees’ sense of home and strengthening their ties with family back home in the face of unequal border regimes, and in dealing with processes of inferiorization and racialization in their countries of (at least temporary) arrival. This article seeks to shed light on migrants’ ability to act through food in conditions of disadvantage and marginality. Without limiting the notion of agency to the concept of resistance, it investigates how norms, constraints and injustices can be interpreted, experienced, inhabited and handled in a variety of ways that are molded both locally and historically. Food emerges as a symbolic, relational and moral resource that gives form to the unequal relationships between social groups, shapes forms of exclusion and subjectivities, and allows people to reinterpret colonial past.