Call for Papers

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   For ever, human beings have been mobilized by a quest for survival. Throughout history, and above all in times of scarcity, that impulse led to the development of strategies devised to face the urgency of an empty stomach. The search for food fostered ingenuity and transformed them into producers of material and immaterial culture, exemplified by: manufacturing of tools,  controlling of fire, sedentarization, domestication of animals and plants, founding of cities, storage of surpluses, engaging in commercial trade, invention of tools to collect information and preserve memory, constantly increasing the complexity of social systems, formalizing different kinds of identity cohesion, and fostering the appearance of symbolization and abstract thought, among other things.

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   Cultures are ways of adapting to the (natural and/or human) environment, whose success is measured by the capacity of individuals and communities to maintain themselves and prosper. However, in contexts of abundance, the primary biological function of food tends to become almost “invisible”. Throughout history, as soon as the quantity and quality of foods providing human welfare is ensured, some foods came to be valued and differentiated for various reasons, such as: ease of access, nutritional value, their presence in consumption, exoticism, tasteful nature, or symbolic representation, etc.

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   Foods thus acquire cultural identities that rescue them from the silence of a purely instrumental use. Religion, art, literature and gastronomy are among the main cultural domains that bring foods to new domains of re-signification. And even though this phenomenon is not new, the cult of certain products and alimentary techniques is increasingly more important in the fields of health, tourism, fashion, ecology and practical philosophy.

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   Never before have so many different foods promised longevity, salvation or, on the contrary, been accused of being harmful for humankind. In societies in which there is abundance – and despite an inequality in distribution – we now see an increase in the importance attributed to food, which is transformed into an object of cult and a vector of social distinction. At the same time, there is also a growing reflection directed towards new food forms, better suited to the demands of sustainable natural and environmental resources.

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   DIAITA’s 6th Portuguese — Brazilian Colloquium on the History and Cultures of Food puts forward, as a suggested topic of reflection, a debate on the role of Food Cultures in the setting up of culture itself (taken in its broadest sense, the result of human ingenuity) and to analyze the evolution that made it possible for some foods, from Antiquity to the present, to acquire such prestige that they originated Food Cults (manifested in religious, ethical, artistic, gastronomic, medical and touristic contexts).

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   PProposals to be submitted must revolve around one (or both) of these two axes of reflection. We welcome approaches that are broad, interdisciplinary and historicized as well as approaches that adopt a more vertical or disciplinary account of the following topics for each of the thematic axes:

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From Food Cultures…

1. Food and survival: eating to live

2. Food and cultural mobility: mobility of foods, people and communities;

3. Food and heritage: cultural and collective identities;

4. The pathways of food: local, global and local food;

5. Food and social hierarchies: eating in order to be and to honor;

6. Paradoxes of contemporary food: pleasure, aesthetics, health and medicalization.

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...To Food Cults

1. Sacred foods: feeding the soul and the divine, and taboo foods;

2. Foods that save, foods that condemn: symbolic narratives and the quest for the perfect body;

3. New limits of the edible: non-conventional foods;

4. Natural foods: a construct?

5. Terroir foods: tourism and sustainability;

6. Food-medicine: super-foods, nutraceuticals and probiotics;

7. Fashion-foods;

8. Food art: the “gastronomization” of the beautiful