The cultural Other’s ways of eating. On embodied subjectivities, diets and inclusion of diversity.

The notion of subjectivation is employed in the human and social sciences to define the dynamic and complex process of definition of the self. In this process, several factors interact, both rising from those which appear as inner needs and from cultural and social expectations. This occurs at different levels of the individual’s everyday life’s experience, one of which is the material one. At this level we find diets, which actively perform on corporeality meant as embodied self. The materiality of food habits and culinary practices is the site where the stratified definition of individual subjectivity take place and where cultural and social belongings are represented and negotiated.
In order to support this statement, I will present the life history of the key informant of my doctoral research that was devoted to the culinary practices of a group of Moroccan women living in context of migration. The ethnographic data were collected during an eighteen months fieldwork conducted in Milan hinterland (Italy). Through participant observation and semi-structured interviews, I studied the way of eating of this woman and her family. Their diet was influenced by several factors, among which the most relevant one was the illness of one of the children, a young girl suffering from diabetes mellitus. The (micro)materiality of food choices made by her mother for her nourishment, played a crucial role in the definition of the girl’s body and of its representation. In fact, this woman negotiated her culinary practices, stemming from her embodied memory, with medical prescriptions and instruments in order to restore her child’s body to health and thus shaping it as socially acceptable. We see a double-direction movement involving food and the body: the incorporation of appropriate nourishment, assured by a strict measurement of food biological components, and the excorporation of some physiological functions delegated to external medical devices. Such dynamics are aimed at making the child’s body comply with those biomedical norms that control the individuals’ access to the “healthy collectivity”. The medical work on the body through food corresponds to the normalization of the cultural Other’s ways of eating, a process that seems to be fundamental to migrants’ integration in the host society.
In this paper I will discuss these issues focusing on food practices as material culture which actively participates to the embodied process of subjectivation. I will support my presentation with visual materials.