SOAS, University of London (The School of Oriental and African Studies)

Research

Approaching bodies as a site through which regulatory power relations are played out, the central objective of my primary project is to examine how nutrition education programmes, which are instigated by the state and implemented by local health professionals and NGOs, are experienced and negotiated by individuals living within the ‘migrant/peasant’ households that the primary target of such programmes. In asking this question, my broader purpose is to elucidate how individuals experience, perform and, potentially, contest asymmetrical social relations through their bodies, in addition to understanding how specific knowledges about ‘healthy’ bodies and ‘good’ food are socially produced and valorised. My secondary objectives are to contribute a deeper comprehension of the relation between migration/remittances and modes of eating, and to assess the extent that eating can be a form of political practice in this context.

Building on scholarship on the medicalisation of obesity, I am particularly concerned with questions of disciplinary power, and look to address these theoretical concerns through a specific ethnographic context in which a social hierarchy, while historically deeply entrenched, is also being contested by migration, remittances, conspicious consumption, and diversified livelihoods. My primary research question is ‘how do individuals from targeted peasant households experience and interpret nutrition initiatives?’, and I examine the extent that ideas presented by public programmes are brought into, and adopted, by private households. I thereby explore the ways that eating and feeding practices change within the home, in addition to answering questions concerned with the ways that actors intepret, adapt and circumnavigate the nutritional guidelines presented in workshops. Developing upon work that notes that class is performed through deference and patronage, I pay particular attention to the extent that targeted individuals defer to health professionals, while also documenting the ways in which their knowledge is contested, both in public and private spaces. Acknowledging that eating practices are not only informed by wealth, structural position and aspirations, but also shaped by generational tensions, my research also includes the voices and perspectives of young people, in addition to identifying differences and similarities based on gender, sources of income, and the presence of returned migrants.

One of the aims of my research is to move beyond categoric discussions of class, and consider how relations between specific social groups, in this context health professionals and the peasantry, are interpreted and made manifest through the embodied practices of eating and feeding. Thus I  ask, 'while we can theoretically interpret these programmes as class-based interventions into the private lives of less-privileged  groups, do the actors involved construct it in these terms or apply a different idiom?'. In asking this question I not only aim to ensure that my analysis is shaped within my participants’ paradigms, but also show how politically asymmetrical relations can be performed, upheld and contested through bodily actions. The ideas presented by nutrition programmes are discursively created and valued, and thus, informed by scholarship on discourse and governmentality, my research asks how and why specific knowledges about healthy bodies are constructed and valorised by actors, and I examine the role these models play in facilitating and justifying political intervention. However, while I am interested in the consequences of the extension of the state into private life, I aim to move beyond using class dynamics as a sole analytical paradigm by focusing on the circulation and production of these knowledges, the manner in which they are accepted and contested by different actors, and the ways this interplays with ‘social capital’ and subjectivites. My research will thus unpack the scales of discourse and social frameworks in which bodily practices are situated and governed, and look to understand, in turn, how individuals shape these frameworks through their own relations and practices; thus contributing a nuanced reading of how the complexities of class are embodied and performed.

One of the unexpected consequences of the global recession is the high number of retirees from the US, the UK and Australia looking to permanently relocate to the Ecuadorian highland city of Cuenca, and my second area of research concentrates on the social and cultural implications of this inward migration. In particular, I examine a perceived lack of integration though the lens of migrants’ food practices, and indicate the ways in which this social group both engages with particular food spaces while also withdrawing from others. Unpacking notions of nostalgia, I thereby explore migrants’ concepts of  “a good life and good food” through the lens of time politics, city/countryside relations and structural relations between the Global North and South, and examine how these ‘play-out’ and inform local class relations. My interest is therefore the ways in which migrants negotiate the disjuncture between their dreams and practical lived experience, and I look to explore their cultural boundaries regarding food, nutrition, the body and personal safety.

Publications:

• Forthcoming, 2012, Abbots, E-J. & Lavis A. (eds.) Why We Eat, How We Eat: Contemporary Encounters Between Foods and Bodies, Aldershot: Ashgate.
• Forthcoming, 2012, Abbots, E-J., ‘Clean Foods and Clean Bodies: Anxiety, Risk and Pollution among Expatriates in Highland Ecuador’ in Why We Eat, How We Eat: Contemporary Encounters Between Foods and Bodies, E-J. Abbots & A. Lavis (eds) Aldershot: Ashgate.
• Forthcoming, 2012, Abbots, E-J., ‘In the Absence of Men?: Gender, Migration and the Remaking of the Household in the Southern Ecuadorean Andes’ in the Journal of Latin American Studies 44(1).
• Forthcoming, Abbots, E-J., ‘The Celebratory and the Everyday: Guinea Pigs, Hamburgers and the Performance of Food Heritage in Highland Ecuador’ in Celebrations: The Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2011: M. McWilliams (ed), London: Prospekt Books.
• Forthcoming, 2012, Lavis, A. & E-J. Abbots, ‘Introduction: Mapping the New Terrain of Eating: Reflections on the Encounters between Foods and Bodies’ in Why We Eat, How We Eat: Contemporary Encounters Between Foods and Bodies, E-J. Abbots & A. Lavis (eds) Aldershot: Ashgate.
• 2011, Abbots, E-J., ‘“It Doesn’t Taste as Good from the Pet Shop”; Guinea Pig Consumption and the Performance of Class and Kinship in Highland Ecuador and New York City’ in Food, Culture and Society 14 (2): 205-224.
• Forthcoming, 2012, Abbots, E-J., ‘A Review of Coffee and Community: Maya Farmers and Fair-Trade Markets (S. Lyon)’ in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
• 2010, Abbots, E-J., ‘A Review of Uncertain Tastes: Memory, Ambivalence and the Politics of Eating in Samburu, Northern Kenya (J. Holtzman)’ in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16: 661-662.
• 2009, Abbots, E-J., ‘A Review of Ethnographic Fieldwork: An Anthropological Reader (Robben & Sluka)’ in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15: 662-663.

Conference Papers  (selected):

• 2011, Sourcing ‘Good’ Food in the City: Discourse, Practice and Class in Highland Ecuador at Food & Foodways in the City & Countryside Symposium, Universidad de Lisboa, Portugal, 7-8 November.
• 2011, The Celebratory and the Everyday: Guinea Pigs, Hamburgers and the Performance of Food Heritage in Highland Ecuador at ‘Celebrations’: The 30th Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery, St Catherines College, University of Oxford, 8-10 July.
• 2011, Making Migrants Matter: Obligation, Investment and the Performance of Reputation among Transnational Households in Highland Ecuador and the United States at Latin American Research Forum, LSE, University of London, 22 June.
• 2011, “Good Food & Good Living”: Dreams, Reality & the Politics of Integration among Privileged Migrants in Highland Ecuador at Migration: Economic Change, Social Challenge, Conference, UCL in association with Norface, 6-9 April.
• 2010, Food, Power and Globalisation, Invited Lectures, University of Azuay, Cuenca, Ecuador, 29 & 31 March.
• 2009, “It Doesn’t Taste as Good from the Pet Shop”; Guinea Pig Consumption Among Ecuadorian Migrants in New York City at Food and Migration Conference, SOAS, University of London 1-2 February.
• 2008,The Taste of Tradition: Comida Típica, Mobility and Time Politics in Highland Ecuador at Food Forum, SOAS, University of London, 21 November.
• 2008, Apprenticeship, Knowledge Transmission and Social Change in the Ecuadorian Andes at Expanding Boundaries Conference, SOAS, 30 October.
• 2008, Keeping Loved Ones Present: Gender, Food and Migration in Highland Ecuador at Anthropology in London, Current Research (II) Conference, Goldsmiths, University of London, 13 June.
• 2008, Caught Between Two Worlds: Waged Domestic Labour and the ‘Modern’ Household in the Ecuadorian Andes at Waged Domestic Labour and the Making of the Modern World Conference, University of Warwick, 9-11 May.

Conferences and Seminars Series Convened:

• 2011, ‘Why We Eat How We Eat: Food Choices, Nutrition & the Politics of Eating’, International Conference Goldsmiths, in association with SOAS Food Studies Centre, University of London, 24 February.
• 2007, Latin America Seminar Series, UCL, University of London.
• 2007, ‘Ethnography Beyond Anthropology’, Goldsmiths, University of London, November.
• 2007, ‘The Embodied Experience’ Workshop, Goldsmiths, March.

Publications