Food as affirmative biopolitics at the border: liminality, eating practices, and migration in the Mediterranean

ABSTRACT

Based on long term archaeological ethnography on the border island of Lesvos situated on Europe’s margins, this article explores the regimes of eating and the role of food practices in the refugee camp/processing centre of Moria. Starting from the double liminality of eating and border-crossing, it outlines and juxtaposes two regimes of corporeal life. The first is the biopolitical arena of official food provision as produced by the border apparatus and the logic of humanitarian governmentality. This regulates border-crosser’s time and daily routines and renders them ‘people of concern’, tress-passers or victimized individuals with no agency. The second is the affective, trans-corporeal, multi-sensorial field of cooking, eating, making kin, making community. It is produced through the agency of border-crossers themselves, when they take charge of their own eating. In doing so, they constitute eating in these liminal conditions as affirmative biopolitics, as the affirmative politics of life and hope.

KEYWORDS:

• Eating
• border-crossing
• refugee camps
• contemporary archaeology
• archaeological ethnography
• Greece

Acknowledgments

This article is based on a paper presented at the 84^thmeeting of the Society for American Archaeology, in Albuquerque, New Mexico (2019), in a session convened by Erin Riggs and Randy McGuire. I am indebted to Alfredo Gonzalez-Ruibal for the encouragement, and to Maria Choleva, Eva Mol, Katerina Rozakou and two anonymous referees for useful comments, advice and help. Above all, I will be forever grateful to my research collaborators in Lesvos, people who live there but mostly people in transit, who embraced me from day one and shared with me their lives. My solidarity towards them cannot repay my debt.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. https://www.kathimerini.gr/society/986858/eyropaiki-ereyna-gia-ta-kondylia-sitisis/ [accessed 23 March 2021].

2. https://www.lesvosnews.gr/18123/friki-metanastes-mazevan-ke-etrogan-ta-adespota-skylia-tis-mytilinis-vinteo/ (last accessed 26 March 2021).

3. https://www.zoosos.gr/o-filozoikos-sullogos-lesbou-kibotos-mutilinis-diapseudei-dimosieuma-pou-stoxopoiei-metanastes-legontas-oti-trone-ta-adespota/#axzz7H6gRd5Xt (last accessed, 5 January 2022).

4. As happened, for example, in 2015, on the border between Greece and the Republic of North Macedonia. https://globalnews.ca/news/2356525/migrants-sew-their-mouths-shut-in-protest-at-greek-border/ (last accessed, 26 March 2021).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yannis Hamilakis

Yannis Hamilakis is Joukowsky Family of Archaeology and Professor of Modern Greek Studies at Brown University. He has researched and published on archaeology of the body and the senses, on the archaeology of eating, on the politics of the past, on archaeological ethnography, on the photographic and the archaeological, and on the materiality of contemporary migration, and on the archaeology of Greece. His books include The Nation and its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology, and National Imagination in Greece (2007); Archaeology and the Senses: Human Experience, Memory, and Affect (2013), Camera Kalaureia: An Archaeological Photoethnography (with Fotis Ifantidis; 2016); and the edited volume, The New Nomadic Age: Archaeologies of Forced and Undocumented Migration (2018). He co-directs the Koutroulou Magoula Archaeology and Archaeological Ethnography Project, and since 2016 he is carrying out a research-cum-activism project on the archaeology of contemporary migration on Lesvos. He has also curated a series of exhibitions at Brown University, most recently ‘Transient Matter: Assemblages of Migration in the Mediterranean’ which is currently on show at the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology (https://blogs.brown.edu/transientmatter/)