Living ethnography in the anthropology of food

Pastoral culture as a process of agro-food identity and community transformation

Abstract

This article presents a case of living ethnography applied to food anthropology in Berastegi (Basque Country), demonstrating how ethnographic research transcends descriptive documentation to become a tool for community transformation. Starting from a collaborative and participatory methodological approach, the author combines traditional data collection techniques with collective reflection dynamics, brainstorming, and co-design with local actors.

The ethnography evolves from the publication of a community book toward the creation of organizational structures (pastors' roundtable) and cultural platforms (BE! festival) that activate the latent pastoral identity of the territory. The analysis of food embodiment -understood as a process through which local agrifood products, especially artisanal cheese, symbolically, sensorially, and emotionally incorporate history, landscape, and community identity into the bodies of producers and consumers- reveals the generative potential of food anthropology to resist global homogenization and create sustainable and rooted development models.

The article argues that living ethnography constitutes a committed methodology that amplifies marginalized knowledge and facilitates cultural resignification through food practice. It reflects anthropology's role as a transformative discipline that must go beyond academia and connect with everyday life. A humble, reflexive, and committed anthropology is reclaimed, one that attends and accompanies rather than explains.

This work presents the evolution from a classical ethnography toward a living ethnography. Living ethnography is viewed as a process, not product, and as a way of imagining sustainable futures from shared experiences.