Whether regarding tomato festivals, traditional rice varieties, cathead biscuits, or Nowrooz food gatherings, Moveable Gardens offers multiple snapshots of moving people, foods, and memories. As John Hartigan Jr. points out in the foreword, the guiding “torsion” of this collection lies between the “locatedness of sanctuaries and the fluidity of itineraries” (p. xiii). The book is the result of a panel presented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in 2017, and each chapter gives a sense of the intellectual camaraderie that this panel has fostered. Contributors include senior and junior scholars from various fields, including anthropology, environmental studies, rhetoric, nutrition, and food studies. Each provides an ethnographic case study that chronicles itinerant lives of both humans and a variety of nonhumans, from heirloom tomatoes, to rice, yeasts, and soft, red, winter wheat.
In putting in conversation multispecies ethnography, mobility, and memory studies, this book highlights the central role...
University of California Press