The Taste of Home: Food and Surroundings in Bioregionalism and Rural South East Asia

Comprising two domains of research, this subproject investigates the extent to which the relationships of social groups to their surroundings are constitutive for home(s) or a sense of belonging. It focuses on the spatial modeling of home through food relationships, a topic that has received little systematic research to date. Drawing on Food Studies and Multispecies Anthropology, the project explores how food relationships with the surroundings—such as production, processing, and consumption—create community, place-based attachment, and identity, thereby generating a sense of belonging.

To grasp the fundamental possibilities of the entanglement of home, environment, and food, the subproject integrates two complementary perspectives: Home can be understood as something that primarily belongs to the past and solidifies into an image in memory. To this end, the first part of the subproject focuses on multi-species homelands in Southeast Asia, where belonging is often expressed through local food. Changes to the landscape (dams) or biotopes (plantations) transform these relationships. However, home can also appear as a future form of community that must first be achieved through newly created relationships with food and the surroundings. This is the topic of the second part of the subproject: It investigates to what extent theories of bioregionalism and projects based on them derive their appeal and relevance from the fact that they realize, or at least promise, a sense of belonging through relationships with the natural surroundings. This dual approach of the subproject corresponds to and allows to reconstruct, on the one hand, a habitual multisensory experience of the natural surroundings encompassing animals, plants, landscapes, etc., and, on the other hand, an initially spiritual relationship with the natural surroundings that can only be anchored in a multisensory way in the future.The common background of these complementary perspectives is the perception of a lack of relationships with the natural surroundings due to the influence of globalizing and urbanizing developments as well as capitalist and modernizing forces.