Our Concept
Beyond Insecurity
This project studies indigenous foodways and food insecurity as a lived, physical and sensory experience imbued with contested moral, political, and affective significance for those subjected to deleterious effects. I call the study “Beyond Insecurity” (hereafter the BI). The BI aims to conceptualise food insecurity as a material, moral, affective, and symbolic experience. BI combines empirical and discursive analyses to stimulate a critical and mutually productive dialogue between the lived experience of insecurity, the indigenous perspective, and the established concept and measurement of food insecurity.
BI concept employs the empirical examination of the status of indigenous food security. It evaluates all four recognised components of food security—food availability, access, utilisation and stability—at household levels and how CC has affected them. Then, it investigates how CC affects how people produce, process, consume, and distribute food.
The BI concept also evaluates the empirical findings on food security, the changing of indigenous foodways in the moral, political, and ontological senses, and how indigenous peoples construct their identity and environment. It examines how food insecurity is shaped not merely by food access and availability but also by what kind of food, who produced it, where it came from, and how they consume it (see Chao 2021).
Lastly, the BI concept attends to the political aspect of foodways. Scholars point to the inadequate understanding and technocratic intervention of mainstream climate change to generate new technocratically driven ecomodernist solutions (such as promoting intensive farming, large-scale food production, and employment outside agriculture), reiterating the troubling argument that food scarcity is tied to the imbalance of power relations. This point requires a multi-site and interdisciplinary tradition of scholarship that understands the links between knowledge, power, position, and the reorganisation of food materials and their impacts on nature and people.
Methods
The project will employ an interdisciplinary methodology that combines qualitative and quantitative methods. The methods will be rooted in multi-level and multi-site ethnography that focuses on networks or connections of people, food resources, meanings, or cultures, amongst other things (Marcus, 1998). The basis is participant observation: being part of and observing how indigenous communities in Mentawai Island, North Halmahera, and North Sumatra uplands produce, consume, and distribute food.
Considering the impact of climate change is elusive and not straightforward, participant observation requires careful planning, understanding of the local language, building a deep understanding of the local environmental history and resource extraction, and developing genuine engagement to gather information related to food resources and food intake. Further qualitative methods are key-informant interviews, collecting archival and grey documentation and discourse analysis of published and unpublished documents, policies and Internet sources. All this enriches and clarifies participatory observations and the triangulation of ethnographic data.
Quantitative food intake, caloric measurement, and household surveys will be conducted to complement the qualitative methodology. A food intake frequency survey is the specific method for measuring food consumption (Ulijaszek 2004; Henry and Macbeth 2004). The frequency survey is ‘designed to obtain qualitative, descriptive data on usual intakes of foods or classes of food over a long period’ (Ulijaszek 2004, 122). The data obtained is not about nutritional precision but a general overview of food consumption that usefully accompanies and complements the qualitative ethnographic and anthropological research. This method is highly appropriate and helpful to compare the food patterns of two or more groups within a population.
Another quantitative method is the household survey, which collects quantitative information on household property and livelihoods, food availability, and the pattern of activities in gathering edible and non-edible resources daily. The household survey also provides a direct indicator of variations in income-generating activities and insight into (potential) opportunities for socio-economic development.
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