Commensality as citizenship. An Ethnographic Journey through Food and Migration

This introduction to the special issue Food, Migration, Passages. Foodways which are brought and met, outlines encounters and misunderstandings between Migration Studies and Food Studies. Focusing on the ambivalent power relations in both doing and writing ethnographies, we discuss the increasing concern for the analysis of the way in which material and cultural dimensions in food practices intertwine. The metaphor and reality of migrants’ “food suitcase”, and the journey it makes, is used to consider analogies between commensality/conviviality in food dynamics and citizenship processes. The individual and collective acts of commensality/conviviality define boundaries through secular rituals and normative requirements, in the same way as citizenship policies define territorial and legal borders limit the inclusion of migrants. Food that circulates, in the next five articles, mirrors the inequalities and interdependencies of the subjects involved, as well as their different possibilities of agency.