Food and Bodily Fabrication

An alimentary approach to personhood in Papua New Guinea

Authors

• Johanna L. Whiteley London School of Economics and Political Science

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30676/jfas.v34i1.116494

Abstract

This paper exposes the integral role of food within the production of social configurations and the persons who constitute them in Papua New Guinea (PNG). The critical appraisal of current perspectives on food in PNG reveals the necessity of providing a theoretical framework that allows its exchange and consumption to be analysed simultaneously. In order to achieve this, a reconceptualisation of the body as fabricated is undertaken, which in turn, evokes  recent attempts to translate ‘ontological perspectivism’ into Melanesia. Drawing upon this theoretical manoeuvre, an ontologically significant relationship is elucidated between the ingestion of food, bodily transformation, and the production of different ‘types’ or ‘kinds’ of person in PNG. The reanalysis of data from existing ethnography reveals how persons throughout this region manipulate both external and internal relations through the exchange and consumption of food in order to activate crucial differentiations between persons. These arguments suggest that food should be elevated as a critical focus in anthropological studies of social processes in PNG, specifically those concerned with the activation of personhood.

Keywords: food, ontological perspectivism, bodily transformation, social processes,
personhood