Approaches

BI draws three significant approaches: food anthropology, environmental humanities, and political ecology. Food anthropology offers mixed methodologies for examining food’s material and symbolic importance. The primary method of participant observation generates a thick description of indigenous foodways, which is the basis of analysis of food insecurity from emic perspectives. It also constitutes a nutritional study that employs quantitative measurements of nutritional intake and calorific expenditure with the physical and bodily experience that informs the analysis of food insecurity from the etic perspective.  With these mixed methodologies, food anthropology shows that food insecurity and vernacular terms like hunger and hunger are not presumed universal phenomena but culturally bounded, intersubjective, and lived.

The emerging environmental humanities shed critical light on the global connections and planetary effects of CC and offer promising opportunities for collaborative dialogue across academic disciplines towards a holistic understanding of healthy food production and environmental change. Environmental humanities attempt to “provincialise” the Anthropocene (DeLoughrey 2019; 10), a way to challenge the universalisation of global policy and intervention narratives by attending, understanding, and promoting decolonial discourses in which indigenous perspectives matter. The discipline calls attention to how stories of environmental problems are told and how crises are narrated or visualised by marginalised perspectives.

Political ecology is one approach that critically interrogates the power relations that intersect and affect access to food resources to reveal disparities and injustices in the distribution of natural resources. It emphasises multi-scale politics and conflicts over food resources and the political-economic contexts in which these play out. Political ecology situates the locally articulated and experienced food insecurity into the multi-scalar (national, global) narrative. It locates the cause of insecurity by analysing complex social, political, and ecological settings. The political ecology approach also critically examines the global narrative’s well-established discourses, such as food sovereignty and security.

The holistic, interdisciplinary, and historically informed approaches lead to a detailed, ethnographically grounded, and conceptually innovative framework of indigenous foodways that highlights the intrinsic relations between individual physical health, collective cultural wellbeing, global ecological concerns, and the power relations of indigenous people and others. This interdisciplinary approach will contribute theoretical excellence and practical relevance, including the formulation of longer-term solutions crucial for preserving indigenous foodways.