DE LA COCINA A LA MESA IV REUNIÓN DE ECONOMÍA EN EL PRIMER MILENIO A.C. CAUDETE DE LAS FUENTES (Valencia) 22 y 23 DE OCTUBRE DE 2009

	Cuisine and Colonialism: Culinary Encounters in Ancient Mediterranean France Michael Dietler (University of Chicago)
	Contemporary foodways and identities around the world are in large measure the product of a long history of colonial encounters. Reciprocally, food has been a consistently prominent material medium for the enactment of colonialism. The intimate links between food practices and the embodiment of identity, and between commensality and politics, have made the domain of food a central arena for the working out of colonial struggles over the colonization of consciousness and strategies of appropriation and resistance. Hence, a focus on food holds great analytical promise for archaeologists in their attempts to penetrate and understand ancient colonial situations and their transformative effects on identity. To help realize the potential of this avenue of investigation, this chapter attempts to provide the relationship between food, identity, and colonialism with a broader theoretical context in the course of pursuing a set of fundamental questions: why and how do people sometimes change their food habits in situations of colonial contact -in particular, why and how do they adopt alien foods and food practices? And when they do, what consequences (intended and unintended) does this entail, and what implications does it have for understanding colonialism? The discussion draws particularly upon ethnographic and archaeological research I have conducted in Kenya and Mediterranean France, respectively, to develop theoretical points and to demonstrate the utility of this approach for the archaeology of the colonial encounters.
	Departament de Prehistòria i Arqueologia de la Universitat de València. Servei d'Investigació Prehistòrica (SIP) i Museu de Prehistòria de la Diputació de València. Ayuntamiento de Caudete de las Fuentes.