The colonization and silencing of an ancestral eating

Abstract

Beyond its biological function of nutrition and maintenance of the organism, food constitutes a point of convergence between the cultural, political, and historical dimensions of a group. More than a gesture of sharing, the preparation and consumption of food can act as mediators of bonds, memories, and continuities, articulating relations between those who remained and those who have already departed. In territories decimated by the violence of colonial projects, however, an obstacle to the continuity of these practices is established. Given this scenario, the present study aims to analyze Amerindian resistances to colonial structures through ancestral food practices. To this end, a bibliographic survey on the history of food in Brazil was conducted to collect information on the interface between the food practices of indigenous peoples and the different modes of relations cultivated between the living and the dead. The collected data were analyzed based on Benedictus de Spinoza's Ethics and Vinciane Despret's ethology of the dead, in critical dialogue with anti-colonial theories. The results demonstrate that the Westernization of eating does not constitute merely a change of habits, but an epistemicidal technology that operates through the weakening of a power to exist (potentia).