Emotion and affect in translocal relations of care

Abstract

For my master thesis I researched canned meals which are sent between Tunisia and Germany/France. I was guided by the question how the material quality of the food impacts translocal belongings and translocal spaces (Bromber 2013, Anthias 2021). Moreover, I focused on the role that emotion and affect have in this context (Pile 2010). While researchers have covered food consignments and their different social, symbolical and spatial effects (e.g. Komarnisky 2009, Mares 2012), Tunisia presents a special case: Elaborate meals are prepared, mostly by mothers, grandmothers or aunts, then put into cans and send to their grown-up offspring living abroad, a process I summaries as Mise en Conserve.

In my paper, I want to address the intergenerational relations of care and social reproduction that emerge in this context. My research partners are finding ways of performing care translocally through cooking and eating. Social reproductive work is thus materialized through certain foods. The emotional and affective quality of canned foods can symbolize the ongoing negation of family relations and connections to places of memories (Abdel-Malek Neil 2017). Consequently, who is caring for whom is not clear cut: The process is an important way of staying in touch and fostering translocal forms of belonging in a reciprocate way.

Moreover, the practices of social reproduction I looked at are taking place at various places: Mothers are cooking meals in their home-kitchens which are then brought to small factories where the foods are canned and sent off with the post or specialized transport services just to be opened and re-heated in the private space of a kitchen again. Various unpaid and paid actors are involved in the process of Mise en Conserve, forming a complex base of social reproduction across scales. The material practices of cooking and eating which can be experienced through the body can be understood as one way of “eating [ones] way home” (Wong 2019, 150). These experiences are neither a remedy for the distance between people nor are they free from romanticized notions of home and (family) relations. However, it is precisely this unperfect way of eating a way home that can provide a setting for negotiating translocal forms of care, of social reproduction and feelings of belonging.

Building on my own qualitative research as well as theories of translocal belonging (Anthias 2009, 2020) and translocal care (Tan & Yeoh 2011, Siim 2021) I would like to discuss the following questions:

1.What kind of translocal spaces of social reproduction come into being around the practice of sending food? What is their importance in the everyday life of people?

2.How can we research (translocal) forms of social reproduction? And in what way can emotion and affect open up new perspectives on the people involved and the spaces produced?