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Title
Beyond food security: a political ecology of postcolonial foodways and 'good' food in urban Zimbabwe |
Full text
https://hdl.handle.net/1842/37600; http://dx.doi.org/10.7488/era/881 |
Date
2020 |
Author(s)
Brouwer, Sara Filippa |
Contributor(s)
Wilson, Marisa; Molony, Thomas; Laurier, Eric; other |
Abstract
This thesis looks at the foodways of urban Zimbabweans in their daily lives.
Foodways encompass the social, cultural and economic meanings, practices
and processes in the production, sourcing, preparation and consumption of
food. More specifically, I investigate what 'good' food means to urban
Zimbabweans and critically evaluate how ideas and practices about 'good'
food (hereafter without quotation marks) intersect with socio-ecological,
economic and political processes at different personal and structural
interconnected scales. Drawing upon six months of ethnographic participant
observation and qualitative interviews in Chitungwiza and Johannesburg, this
thesis demonstrates that urban Zimbabweans' daily engagements with food
involve complex social and cultural meanings and practices. Using a political
ecology lens, it also shows that urbanites' food relationships stand in relation
to agrarian histories, colonial value systems borne out of colonial policies of
conquest and control and post-independence structural violence. I
demonstrate how urban Zimbabweans create a narrative of natural and local
good food that is based on socio-ecological imaginaries of ways of being and
living in kumusha, their rural ancestral homeland. I, furthermore, examine how
urbanites negotiate this good food narrative with other valorisations of good
food that are based on ideas of progress, development, modernity and social
hierarchies. Lastly, I look at how gendered roles and responsibilities regarding
the provision of good food are produced, employed and contested in the
household and intersect with race and colonial discourses of domesticity. This
thesis contributes to debates about how Zimbabwean and African urban
residents' daily relationships to food are conceptualised. By considering
urbanites' multifarious foodways and how good food is constructed in space
and in time, this thesis complicates the prevailing paradigm of the study of
food in urban Africa, which is dominated by the food security framework and
crisis narrative that understand food relationships in an instrumental way and
as economically preordained. |
Subject(s)
foodways; urban; Zimbabwe; food security; political ecology; postcolonial |
Language
en |
Publisher
The University of Edinburgh |
Type of publication
Thesis or Dissertation; Doctoral; PhD Doctor of Philosophy |
Format
application/pdf |
Rights
2021-11-30 |
Repository
Edinburgh - University of Edinburgh
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Added to C-A: 2021-05-12;10:50:32 |
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