Food Parcels in International Migration

Intimate Connections

Diana Mata-Codesal, Maria Abranches, Diana Mata-Codesal, Maria Abranches

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9783319403724
• eBook ISBN: 9783319403731
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Mondialisation

This book takes food parcels as a vehicle for exploring relationships, intimacy, care, consumption, exchange, and other fundamental anthropological concerns, examining them in relation to wider transnational spaces. As the contributors to this volume argue, food and its related practices offer a window through which to examine the reconciliation of people's localised intimate experiences with globalising forces. Their analyses contribute to an embodied and sensorial approach to social change by examining migrants and their families' experiences of global connectedness through familiar objects and narratives. By bringing in in-depth ethnographic insights from different social and economic contexts, this book widens the understanding of the lived experiences of mobility and goes beyond the divide between origin and destination countries, therefore contributing to new ways of thinking about migration and transnationalism that take into consideration the materiality of global connections and the way such connections are embodied and experienced at the local level.

© The Author(s) 2018

D. Mata-Codesal, M. Abranches (eds.)Food Parcels in International MigrationAnthropology, Change, and Developmenthttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40373-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Sending, Bringing, Consuming and Researching Food Parcels

Diana Mata-Codesal¹ and Maria Abranches²

(1)

Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain

(2)

University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK

Keywords

TransnationalismMaterialitySensesBelongingIntimacy

Diana Mata-Codesal

is a researcher in the Humanities Department of the Pompeu Fabra University at Barcelona. She obtained her PhD in Migration Studies from the University of Sussex. Her recent projects have dealt with immobility in contexts of high mobility in Mexico (funded by the Basque Country Government), and the othering processes and body readings of diversity in the public space of the city of Barcelona (funded by the Beatriu de Pinós/Marie Curie Cofund programme). Her research interests include articulations and meanings of (im)mobility, transnational families and gender, as well as embodied and sensorial experiences of migration and interaction.

Maria Abranches

is a lecturer in Social Anthropology and Development in the School of International Development at the University of East Anglia. Her main research interests are migration, food and land in African contexts, especially in Lusophone Africa (Guinea-Bissau and Angola). Her current research is concerned with internal migration and return, urban-rural livelihoods and agriculture in post-war Angola. She is also developing a participatory research project on migration in Norfolk, UK, in collaboration with museums in the region.

End Abstract

Introduction

In 2008, on my first fieldwork visit to Andean Ecuador, I (Diana) encountered, hanging in the window of a carrier agency in the city of Cuenca, a picture of a roasted guinea pig stuffed with hominy and ready to be sent to the US. The sending of food parcels from this region—locally known as Austro—to the US has long been common practice for local families with members abroad. In particular, guinea pig—locally known as cuy—is a culturally loaded foodstuff throughout the Andes (Archetti 1997), widely consumed in festive and ceremonial events in Andean Ecuador, and which reportedly “travels well” (Abbots 2008).

During my fieldwork (2009–2010) in Guinea-Bissau, a small country in the West African coast, I (Maria) helped to harvest, pack, transport, sell, buy, pack again and then send fresh vegetables and fruit in cardboard boxes to Portugal every week, mostly through “informal” carriers found at the airport. “Odja i badjiki pa Europa!” (Look, here are roselle leaves to send to Europe) was the slogan often heard in the local food market in Bissau, announcing the freshness of the vegetables and their guaranteed safe arrival in Europe. In this announcement, the involvement of a complex, trust-based network of farmers, traders, carriers and a variety of other intermediaries in this common transnational practice was also implicit.

The ostensibly anecdotal nature of the two vignettes above and their initial apparent expression of locality and exoticism soon vanish when confronted with the prevalence and importance of small-scale food-sending practices worldwide. For those Ecuadorians in the US who receive food parcels, the meaningless of food eaten daily—predominantly by irregular male migrants from the Austro—in order to just feed working bodies is complemented by the specialness of the contents of the food parcels which are routinely sent from Ecuador (Mata-Codesal 2010). Food parcels are essential in the relationship between migrants and their relatives back in Ecuador, just as they are for Guineans at home and abroad and for many others elsewhere, as the chapters in this book demonstrate. In Bissau, as the vignette shows, market food sellers are familiar with the final destination of the products they sell. They maintain a close relationship with all those involved in the food chain—from production in the urban smallholdings of Bissau’s periphery or further rural settings, to packing and sending the food parcels and final consumption in Portugal—revealing notably close networks and connections across borders. In the summer of 2014, the importance of food parcels in creating, developing and maintaining intimate connections in the context of international migration became even clearer when a group of scholars gathered in the city of Tallinn to share and discuss ethnographic analyses of food parcels being sent, received, brought, consumed and shared by different people, in different locations and under different circumstances.¹ Numerous ethnographic accounts provided ample evidence that food is the most regular type of reverse in-kind remittance being sent. Food and other nourishing substances travel in the shape of small-scale food packages (such as those analysed in this book by Maja Povrzanović Frykman, Raquel Ajates Gonzalez, Karolina Bielenin-Lenczowska, Tiago Silveiro de Oliveira and Amber Gemmeke), and canned goods in cardboard boxes (as the balikbayan boxes explored by Clement C. Camposano and Karina Hof), as well as through larger-scale food distribution mechanisms (as presented by Xavier F. Medina and José A. Vázquez-Medina in the case of Mexican food supply mechanisms in the US). The chapters in this book provide clear proof that the circulation of food and other cooking paraphernalia (in the form of parcels, cardboard boxes or shipping containers) is often present in the most transited of migration corridors worldwide.

Fig. 1.1

Packing Guinean foodstuffs to send to Portugal, Bissau, December 2009 Source: Courtesy of Maria Abranches

This volume provides eight ethnographic analyses of food-sending and food-receiving practices in different migratory contexts. The food parcels that circulate between contiguous countries and within countries—even spanning continents—encapsulate issues of identity and belonging, kinship maintenance and broader socio-cultural reconfigurations. The ethnographic look at food parcels allows us to inquire about migrants’ multiple embeddedness and sense of belonging and their re-contextualised practices of family life at a distance, as well as to look at the various ways in which food links different geographical locations, social networks and even time periods, while helping to render migrants’ worlds meaningful. Food and its related practices are important vehicles through which to examine the reconciliation of people’s localised intimate experiences with globalising forces. The case studies offered in this book contribute to a better understanding of how migration and transnationalism are perceived and experienced at the local level by migrants and their families.

The volume covers a wide spectrum of sending and receiving practices undertaken by international migrants in different migration corridors. The authors ground their analysis in different geographic locations and migration routes in Europe, Africa, America and Asia. The chapters explore food parcels travelling from Eastern Europe to Sweden, from West Africa to the Netherlands, from Spain to the UK, from Macedonia to Italy, from the US, Hong Kong and the Netherlands to the Philippines, from Cabo Verde to Portugal and other European locations, and from Mexico to the US. They also deal with different types of migrant, including international students, asylum-seekers, professional transnationals, low-skilled labour migrants, irregular migrants and reunited relatives. The food parcels addressed in the chapters also include a variety of substances and materials: from raw products, cooked meals, kitchen utensils and jars of preserves, to plants and seeds. Finally, specific exchange and consumption practices are also examined, including face-to-face or technology-mediated commensality, holidays and other special occasions. More importantly, all authors contribute to reveal the diversity of meanings attached to travelling food, the relationships it generates, the variety of sending and receiving practices, the cultural transformations they undergo on their journeys, and the social transformations they produce at local and transnational levels.

Each chapter in this book takes food parcels as a material through which to think about belonging, relationships, intimacy, care, consumption, exchange and other fundamental anthropological concerns, examining them in relation to wider transnational spaces. They offer an in-depth, grounded approach to social change by examining migrants’ and their families’ experiences of global connectedness through familiar object...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Sending, Bringing, Consuming and Researching Food Parcels
• Part I. Food, Identity and Belonging
• Part II. Transnational Kinwork
• Part III. The Circulation of Nourishment and the Deterritorialisation of Food Consumption
• Back Matter