Crossing boundaries between academic disciplines

ICAF celebrates half a century of biosocial cooperation

Abstract

What is food and who studies it?  What is nutrition and who studies it?  … and, anyway, what is anthropology?  Perhaps only a geriatric would consider that these questions need to be tackled. I do it in this journal in the hope that it might stimulate younger commentators to write further papers to question and debate with more contemporary knowledge of at least some of the masses of academic literature worldwide that could be relevant to the anthropology of food and nutrition.  So, in this paper, I first ask ‘what is food?’, then ‘what is nutrition?’ and then ‘what is anthropology?’ and who studies these subjects. Of course, I found in all of them so many perspectives that could be covered that in this paper I shall have omitted many that could be relevant. This all leads to my own view about how significant it is that the International Commission on the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition (ICAF) has for fifty years followed their important ambition to cross the traditional boundaries between academic disciplines in the pursuit of a realistic understanding of any subject tackled that relates to humanity.

I warn readers that there are elements of autobiography in this paper. Of course, the perspectives of each of us will be diverse, but let’s use this difference and communicate with colleagues who are expert where each of us is not, to try to understand their perspectives as well as our own.