Seminar - February 2020
Food as Gift and Food as Weapon: Kinship and Food Exchange among the Newars of Bhaktapur
Paola Tine, Social Anthropology and Development Studies, The University of Adelaide
For the Food Values Research Group's February 2020 seminar, we are pleased to welcome Paola Tine.
Food practices occupy a distinctive place in the Newari culture of Nepal in determining social relationships, family relations, status and differentiation between individuals and groups. Here food is often a means of expressing love, but also the terrain on which conflict can occur. Following a 15-months fieldwork research in the Newari city of Bhaktapur (Nepal, 2018-2019), this presentation will discuss situations in which food becomes a crucial element in the negotiations of social interactions within Newari families, seen here as the nuclei where kinship networking is forged, and new concepts of love and friendship are emerging.
When: Monday 24th February, 12-1pm
Where: Ira Raymond Room, Barr Smith Library, North Terrace Campus, University of Adelaide (click here for campus map)
Paola Tine is an anthropologist with expertise in visual research methods, social change and food practices. After her studies in the Arts & Humanities (2013, BA Human Sciences with a major in Cultural Anthropology, University of Siena), she specialised in Visual Anthropology (2015, MA University of Siena) and in Documentary ethnographic video-making (2017, ETNOfilm, Padova).
She has conducted intensive fieldwork in South Australia and Nepal, where she used traditional qualitative research methods and experimental visual methodologies. In 2018, she received the 'Jon Prosser Award for Outstanding Work by Beginning Scholars in Visual Methodologies' by the International Visual Sociology Association. Her recent work includes a fieldwork among the Nepali-speaking Bhutanese community of Adelaide in collaboration with Professor John Gray.
Since 2017, she has been a member of the Food Values Research Group at the University of Adelaide. Under the supervision of Professor John Gray (The University of Adelaide), Professor Rachel Ankeny (The University of Adelaide) and the internationally recognised painter Gregory Donovan (The University of South Australia), she is currently researching social change in modern Nepal, with a focus on the topic of food practices, family dynamics and healthy eating. The methodological challenge of this study is to show some of the insights of sociological research through visual representation.