Abstract
Creatively operationalizing Claude Lévi-Strauss’ predicament that food is good to think with, I initiate a methodological conceptualization of food by exploring the ways in which it is apt to study Sri Lankan domestic and collective village life. Food is approached as an assemblage that is an emergent resultant of heterogeneous aspects with which it is deeply entangled and by way of which it turns into a potent agent shaping life. More specifically, I explore the vibrancy of these different components that co-create the overall soundscape of food that as such becomes the conductor of Sri Lankan life. Food shapes domestic life by way of its preparation and consumption, and through its cultivation also conducts the collective rhythms at the village level. The conceptualization of food as an assemblage seeks to develop it as a methodology that opens up for a holistic integration and interdisciplinary collaboration.
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Notes
The notion assemblage is the English translation from the French agencement as developed by Deleuze and Guattari and has constituted an approach that is cognate to Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) and Material Semiotics in their focus on the emergence of entities as a result of heterogeneous relations, human and non-human, where agency is distributed (Law 1999, 2009). However, the assemblage approach differs from ANT in that the latter flattens the topology in the form of networks, whereas assemblages can expand or shrink in all directions.
It should be remarked that the very idea of assemblage is not at all new as we can see from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’ (1898) work The Monadology, originally written in 1714, and specifically in paragraph 6, where he contrasts the monad, as a simple substance, with the compound (in our words assemblage) that: ‘comes into being or comes to an end by parts.’
I use pseudonyms for reasons of safeguarding privacy.
Recall that pelting rain is required for the filling of the tank for paddy cultivation whereas soft rain is better for the other forms of cultivation.
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Acknowledgements
The research leading to this publication has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013)/ERC Grant Agreement nr 295843. I wish to thank the ERC for its generous support as well as Marianne Lien, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Vito Laterza, and the anonymous reviewers for commenting on earlier drafts, none of them, however bearing any responsibility for the final views expressed here.
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Van Daele, W. Vibrantly Entangled in Sri Lanka: Food as the Polyrhythmic and Polyphonic Assemblage of Life. Found Sci 23, 85–102 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-016-9509-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-016-9509-4