Unfixing Place: Time and Value in the Anthropology of Food

Abstract

Although many anthropologists have engaged with the political and economic work of “place” in qualifying and working with food, time has rarely featured substantively in the economic and political life of the comestible. Gathering themes from my ethnographic research in Northern Italy and excavation time in anthropological scholarship on food, my call for the “future” is to critically examine how time is necessary to understand place and placemaking in the holistic study of food. Termed time work in my research, this piece briefly unpacks possibilities to consider the role of time as one of practice with food (itself a temporally mediated substance) that shapes not only narratives of memory, nostalgia, or history, but also the constraints and agendas of growing and eating food. In times often glossed as climatologically or economically uncertain, such narratives further necessitate careful attention to temporalities that are made meaningful and practiced. In so doing, I suggest time can offer ways for scholars to move beyond the packaging of place and consider how temporality is put to work out of increasingly constricted margins and exclusionary territories to make values, livelihood, and belonging.