CfP: Feast and Famine: Exploring Relationships with Food in the Pacific

7 September 2012
University College London

Conference organisers: Sarah Byrne (Institute of Archaeology, UCL) and Kaori O'Connor (Anthropology, UCL)

Please submit a paper title and 200 word abstract by 14 May 2012 to Sarah Byrne (s.byrne@ucl.ac.uk)

This one day conference is organised by the newly established UCL Pacific Islands Research Network and responds to the widening interest in the political, economic, cultural and health dimensions of feasting, food production and famine in the Pacific. The conference aims to provide a platform for more engaged dialogue between archaeology, anthropology, history, ecology, economics, epidemiology, health and medical studies, and food studies and the social and historical sciences more broadly. We welcome papers that address issues of food relationships in the Pacific, especially those that draw off interdisciplinary perspectives.

We welcome 20 min papers that focus on:

• Material culture of food and feasting
• Food as material culture
• Landscapes of feasting
• Famine and food security
• Archaeobotanical and Archaeozoological evidence for food production and consumption
• Relationship between seasonality and fasting
• Relationship between plant species and human colonisation
• Rituals of food production and consumption
• Impact of European colonisation on food practices
• Food/feasting as cross-cultural translation
• Contemporary politics of food production and consumption
• Representing food culture in museums
• Food and intangible heritage

Papers from this conference will be published in a book on Food Culture in the Pacific: Interdisciplinary Perspectives.

Registration details to follow

Read more: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/research/directory/pacific_network/conference