While there is a growing body of (anthropological) examinations of human migration and, more recently, food systems, the two are rarely brought together. Both, however, are central aspects of people’s lifeworlds that should not be considered as separate spheres.
Maria Abranches’ Food Connections: production, exchange and consumption in West African migration successfully combines the two in a multi-sited study focusing on how food connects migrants from Guinea-Bissau in Portugal to their homeland. The transnational ties underlying the movement of people and materials, such as food and plants, form tight social and economic relations. The book carefully examines how food practices of the present, such as consumption, production, trading, sending, receiving, gifting, selling and sharing of food, kindle imaginations of the future through memories and stories of the past.
Theoretically, Abranches builds upon Kalpana Ram and Christopher Houston’s definition of phenomenology as ‘an investigation of how humans perceive, experience, and comprehend the sociable, materially assembled world that they inherit at infancy and in which they dwell’.Footnote 1 Bridging this understanding with foundational anthropological concepts leads her to introduce the phenomenology of food and migration. Herein, the joint analysis of food and migration in everyday lived experiences and practices is possible.
The examined processes can be traced back to two brothers in the early 1990s who established the still existing close link between the two (physical) locations. This happened mainly out of the necessity to provide homeland food for Guinean migrant workers in Lisbon. This exchange of foodstuffs goes far beyond mere economic aspirations. How it involves many aspects of people’s livelihoods on either side becomes evident in the five chapters of this beautifully written ethnographic monograph.
The author guides us through social and economic spaces from production (Chapter 1) through to preparation and consumption (Chapter 2), further into (imagined) spheres of making memories and aspiring to join the foods’ migration route (Chapter 3). In the last two chapters, Abranches critically engages with literature on the social norms and patterns surrounding the exchange of foods as gifts and/or commodities (Chapter 4) and the notion of informality (Chapter 5).
Even though she starts her fieldwork at one of the two main markets for – among other things – Guinean homeland food in Lisbon (Rossio), the first chapter takes us to the peri-urban production and urban marketing sites in Guinea-Bissau (Caracol and Bandim markets). She here engages critically with gendered practices of land utilization and politics of land relating to women farmers’ and sellers’ experiences. Their embodied connections to the land and simultaneous engagement in overseas food exchange demonstrate the food’s embeddedness in wider social value systems.
The second chapter logically follows the food – the thing (p. 8) – to its consumption, preparation and adaption in Lisbon while highlighting the spiritual and material connection to the production sites discussed in the previous chapter. After introducing the two main locations of food exchange, Chapter 3 (p. 77) reasonably moves on to unpick the role of temporality in the creation of meaning and value. The preparation, consumption and exchange of food also embody notions of memories that intimately connect to the present and future migration and return aspirations.
Chapter 4 critically engages with debates on reciprocity, moral obligations and the social value of food within a transnational setting. Cross-border connections are maintained in the giving, sending, receiving, trading and reciprocating of food. However, the dynamic processes of how these relations are negotiated contradict a clear-cut differentiation of food as either a commodity or a gift (p. 105). Abranches rather highlights the complex fluidity of the interaction embedded in its broader social context.
Finally, Chapter 5 is dedicated to critiquing informality. Abranches follows Lourenço-Lindell and Meagher in their argument that formal–informal entanglements make for a better representation of lived realities than separating them.Footnote 2 She adds a crucial understanding of how this materializes in migrants’ negotiation of those entwined spheres. This becomes evident in the embeddedness of food businesses in transnational social networks as a consequence of structural factors in both countries.
Altogether, this monograph serves as an excellent starting point for the analysis of the movement of both food and people. Future research, however, may benefit from a stronger conceptual framework dedicated to the more recently emerging literature on sustainable food systems or translocal livelihoods and social network embeddedness – especially with a focus on gender dynamics within such space-spanning network relations and the role played by women for and within sustainable food systems.
Throughout the book, Abranches repeatedly demonstrates how her research relates to general discourses and (longstanding) debates within anthropology, such as critical engagement with colonialism, modernity, cosmopolitanism, development and African subjectivities. Without running the risk of watering down the lived realities of her participants, she suitably contextualizes their embodied experiences through their engagement with the exchange of homeland foods. The ineffable strength of this book lies in the delicately placed ethnographic descriptions. Abranches allows her observations, encounters and participants’ voices to simultaneously direct and underpin the analysis. In conclusion, this ethnographic study makes an excellent case for long-term multi-sited fieldwork that, simultaneously, does not shy away from complex theoretical debates.
