Food poverty and food aid in 21st century UK: a view from anthropology

Where does responsibility for food poverty lie and are there permanent solutions to it? Ahead of her Mary Douglas Memorial Lecture, Pat Caplan outlines some of the issues with the way we understand food poverty in the UK, and explains why we need to re-think our approach towards food aid

Speaking Swahili, Being Swahili? Some Reflections on a Shifting Field Over The Past Half Century

This paper is an epistemological and reflexive account of half a century of research on the Waswahili through the medium of Kiswahili. The first section asks who ‘we’ (scholars) think ‘they’ (subjects of research) are, showing how claims to Swahili identity vary according to historical, geographical and political contexts. It also points out the dangers of orientalism and exoticism and advocates the acknowledgement of the potential for local people to be fellow intellectuals. The second section discusses who ‘they’ (subjects of research) consider themselves to be and how the claiming of Swahili identity has shifted, again according to historical and geographical contexts. In the third section there is a consideration of who ‘they’ think ‘we’ scholars are, since the success of research depends a great deal on how local people perceive us, including by race, gender and education. Importantly, such success also depends on a number of credentials including fluent Kiswahili, knowledge of Islam and familiarity through multiple visits. The final section discusses who we researchers think we ourselves are, the purpose of our research and for whom we write about it. This raises questions around the ethics of research – taking and giving back data and acknowledging that the creation of knowledge is very much a joint venture between locals and researchers

Food Poverty nd Charity in the UK: Food Banks, the Food Industry and the State

By the time I started my research on food poverty in the UK in 2014, it was already widespread and has continued to grow inexorably since that time, with a quantum leap after the advent of the pandemic and the ensuing lockdown. One response has been the growth in food aid organisations, particularly food banks within which there are several categories of players: donors, volunteers and clients. Food banks provide food parcels to clients, often on production of a voucher obtained from a professional agency. Most of the food is ambient – tins, packages, bottles; only recently have some food banks been able to supply any fresh food like fruit and vegetables. Food banks are primarily run by volunteers who collect donated food from supermarkets and elsewhere, sort it by type and date, store it and make up parcels for clients. More recently, donors have also included the food industry which donates ‘surplus’ food to food aid charities. Much of this passes through food collection charities such as Fareshare. This increasing participation of the food industry has enabled more fresh food to be available to food banks while also enabling food companies to claim that they are fulfilling their corporate social responsibilities and thereby improve their ‘brand’. In my research I interviewed many volunteers and even participated in some of their meetings and tasks. Many expressed their dismay about food poverty but few were willing to become activists and seek to challenge the situation from which it arose. Clients for the most part have an ambivalent attitude to food charities. On the one hand, the food parcels they receive help to alleviate some of their needs, but this comes with a heavy price: lack of choice and a feeling of stigma which is often internalised. Only a minority of food banks encourages clients to become volunteers, thereby breaking down the divide between givers and receivers. Why is this happening? • Low wages and precarious employment • Low benefits, plus long waiting times to access Universal Credit • Cuts in benefits It can be summed up as low income, insufficient to meet all needs. The fragility of the charitable response to food poverty has been exposed by the pandemic which has seen unprecedented numbers seeking help. This problem cannot be solved by food banks – it is the result of historically-specific government policies such as austerity and therefore needs significant structural change to ensure that all citizens have sufficient income to feed themselves and their families

The Ethics of Archiving - an Anthropological Perspective

The first ethical issue I want to raise is one of editorial control, something which has already been discussed ad nauseam in the postmodern debates about authorial authority. So that is the second issue I want to raise, and one which will come up again in my talk: does material collected by social scientists become something rather different - historical data - once it is archived? The third issue I want to raise and the major ethical concern in this case was that undertakings of confidentiality should be honoured

Terror, Witchcraft and Risk

This paper was written in the spring of 2004 for a seminar series at a South African university1. It was a moment in time when the war in Iraq had been declared officially over by the President of the United States, but when a War on Terror had been declared by both the US and UK governments. Since that time, events have moved fast: the Madrid train bombings, the growth of the insurgency in Iraq, an election in the UK which saw the Labour Party returned to power with a much reduced majority (largely attributed to discontent over the war), the bombings of July 2005 in London, to name but a few. The editors of AnthroGlobe could have asked me to ‘update’ my paper but they did not do so, wisely in my view. All publications should be read in the context of their time and place, and any publication which seeks to deal with current events risks being out of date between completion and printing. So I have not attempted to ‘update’ the paper - to do so would have required another one

Assets and domestic units: methodological challenges for longitudinal studies of poverty dynamics

Tracking change in assets access and ownership in longitudinal research is difficult. Assets are rarely assigned to individuals. Their benefit and management are spread across domestic units which morph over time. We review the challenges of using assets to understand poverty dynamics, and tracking the domestic units that own and manage assets. Using case studies from longitudinal research we demonstrate that assets can afford useful insights into important change

Hiding or hospitalising? On dilemmas of pregnancy management in East Cameroon

Current international debates and policies on safe motherhood mainly propose biomedical interventions to reduce the risks during pregnancy and delivery. Yet, the conceptualisations of risk that underlie this framework may not correspond with local perceptions of reproductive dangers; consequently, hospital services may remain underutilised. Inspired by a growing body of anthropological literature exploring local fertility-related fears, and drawing on 15 months of fieldwork, this paper describes ideas about risky reproduction and practices of pregnancy protection in a Cameroonian village. It shows that social and supernatural threats to fertility are deemed more significant than the physical threats of fertility stressed at the (inter)national level. To protect their pregnancies from those social and supernatural influences, however, women take very physical measures. It is in this respect that biomedical interventions, physical in their very nature, do connect to local methods of pregnancy management. Furthermore, some pregnant women purposefully deploy hospital care in an attempt to reduce relational uncertainties. Explicit attention to the intersections of the social and the physical, and of the supernatural and the biomedical, furthers anthropological knowledge on fertility management and offers a starting point for more culturally sensitive safe motherhood interventions

“At ‘Amen Meals’ It’s Me and God” Religion and Gender: A New Jewish Women’s Ritual

New ritual practices performed by Jewish women can serve as test cases for an examination of the phenomenon of the creation of religious rituals by women. These food-related rituals, which have been termed ‘‘amen meals’’ were developed in Israel beginning in the year 2000 and subsequently spread to Jewish women in Europe and the United States. This study employs a qualitative-ethnographic methodology grounded in participant-observation and in-depth interviews to describe these nonobligatory, extra-halakhic rituals. What makes these rituals stand out is the women’s sense that through these rituals they experience a direct con- nection to God and, thus, can change reality, i.e., bring about jobs, marriages, children, health, and salvation for friends and loved ones. The ‘‘amen’’ rituals also create an open, inclusive woman’s space imbued with strong spiritual–emotional energies that counter the women’s religious marginality. Finally, the purposes and functions of these rituals, including identity building and displays of cultural capital, are considered within a theoretical framework that views ‘‘doing gender’’ and ‘‘doing religion’’ as an integrated experience

A História da Alimentação: balizas historiográficas

Os M. pretenderam traçar um quadro da História da Alimentação, não como um novo ramo epistemológico da disciplina, mas como um campo em desenvolvimento de práticas e atividades especializadas, incluindo pesquisa, formação, publicações, associações, encontros acadêmicos, etc. Um breve relato das condições em que tal campo se assentou faz-se preceder de um panorama dos estudos de alimentação e temas correia tos, em geral, segundo cinco abardagens Ia biológica, a econômica, a social, a cultural e a filosófica!, assim como da identificação das contribuições mais relevantes da Antropologia, Arqueologia, Sociologia e Geografia. A fim de comentar a multiforme e volumosa bibliografia histórica, foi ela organizada segundo critérios morfológicos. A seguir, alguns tópicos importantes mereceram tratamento à parte: a fome, o alimento e o domínio religioso, as descobertas européias e a difusão mundial de alimentos, gosto e gastronomia. O artigo se encerra com um rápido balanço crítico da historiografia brasileira sobre o tema