Dear colleagues,
We are still accepting abstracts for our session on Food and Identity at
the next World Archaeology Congress (http://wac8.org) to be held this
year (28th August to 2nd September) in the Japanese heritage city of
Kyoto. The session is listed in the programme as T05-H “Food, Identity
and Choice: using diet to explore past social change”.
Details of the session are given below, and we would note that there are
also three other sessions at WAC on related themes: T06-Q "Interactions
between Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherers and Neighbours in Asia", T10-A
“Bones and Society: integrating zooarchaeology and social archaeology”,
and T10-P "Multi-Proxy Evidence for Reconstructing Ancient Diet and
Foodways". There is also a forum that aims to draw together strands from
all these sessions, including ours, to explore methodologies and theory
for investigating such issues: T10-S “Food, Cuisine and Diet:
integrating method and theory”. The details of these sessions can also
be found on the WAC web site. We hope the conference organisers will be
able to timetable these so they can complement each other.
At this stage the scope for our "Food, Identity and Choice" session has
been left deliberately broad, and we hope that researchers using a wide
range of materials and techniques from different time periods and parts
of the world will submit papers to help create a breadth to the
discussions. We include the session abstract below, and it can also be
found on the accepted sessions page at the WAC website
(http://wac8.org/academic-program/accepted-sessions-2/ast05/)
The acts of acquiring, preparing and eating food go beyond simple
sustenance to make statements about identity and shape interactions on a
daily basis. This is especially important during periods of social
change and when different societies make contact and interact. As a
daily marker of social identity, food is vital to processes such as
acculturation and resistance. At both the macro scale, with global
patterns in the movement of crops and animals, and at the more regional
scale, such as where an expanding urbanised society met a smaller rural
or mobile community, exploring how humans have exploited food as part of
their daily lives provides insights into how people negotiated the
changing social landscape around them. This session aims to bring
together the full range of specialisms including, but not limited to,
archaeobotany, zooarchaeology, isotope and residue analysis, and
archaeogenetics from all regions of the world and across all time
periods to discuss the ways in which food can be utilised as a
method/material for exploring the nature of identity in regions of
social contact and change, looking at the issues of colonisation and
resistance, and globalisation and regionality.
Keywords: food, identity, social change
We look forward to hearing from you. Informal queries, comments,
suggestions, criticisms are welcome to [log in to unmask] or
[log in to unmask] Formal submissions for papers need to go through the
WAC web site at http://wac8.org/call-for-submissions/call-for-papers.
The deadline for submissions is 30th April.
Please forward this email to anyone who may be interested in
contributing.
With thanks and best wishes,
Jennifer, Xinyi and Cameron
Jennifer Bates
Trevelyan Research Fellow
Selwyn College
University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB3 9DQ
|