Trajectories of Food Anthropology in Brazil

Abstract

This work takes a look at the academic production carried out in Brazil, from the 1990s onward, from the perspective of the anthropology of food. To do this, we took as a guiding axis the material presented at the Brazilian Anthropology Meetings (RBAs), a starting point for building an overview of studies on the subject. The preliminary analysis of these studies, presented briefly in this text, allows us to notice shifts in focus based on the mapping of issues, initially focused on identities and dietary changes from the perspective of a rhetoric of loss – with a significant number of works focused on local cuisines, regional products –, going through themes that, marked by the interdisciplinary interaction that has always characterized studies in the area and which, in recent years, has been expanding, especially with the area of Nutrition, to the extent that it started to consider the injunctions between food and culture, represent a renewal in the focus of interests, with work concerned with the political dimension of food and eating, in which elements such as health, body, gender, access or the notion of food systems are relevant. These first results allow us to glimpse not only variations in the themes and profiles of researchers, but the emergence of a hybrid field of studies that demands greater reflection, as suggested by the theme of Food and Nutritional Security and Sovereignty (SSAN), which encompasses several approaches, including anthropological. In this sense, thinking especially about the aspects of the discipline, its particularities and the extent to which it can assist in studies in interface and collaboration with other areas, we seek to outline ways through which the theoretical and methodological framework of anthropology can make contributions to the studies of dietary practices and, in particular, for the SSAN area.