Attend on Zoom: https://uio.zoom.us/j/66489559850?pwd=54kA6UbroYrfqSnlcIaez6pkmHFevf.1
Abstract:
This presentation will delve into complex interdependencies of human and other-than-human entities and processes affecting key territorializations or deterritorializations, shaping the research design and execution of the radical interdisciplinary EATWELL project among the semi-nomadic community in Laya. First, the presentation will briefly look at Deleuzian deterritorialization or destabilization and territorialization or stabilization within the radical interdisciplinary encounter between anthropology, nutrition studies and gut microbiome sciences. Second, I will delve into the encounter of our research project—entailing relatively static cross-sectional and relatively mobile anthropological and longitudinal parts—with the highly mobile realities and static processes on the ground. The frictions between destabilization (often in the form of circulations) and stabilization during the research required continuous adjustments vis a vis highly mobile nomads, yaks, horses, microbes, and foodstuffs, and more static entities, such as bureaucracies and astrology, sometimes inhibiting these adjustments. I will make these organizing tropes of territorialization and deterritorialization very concrete through pictural narratives of: 1)The organization of the nutrition and stool sample kits and their transport with vehicles, horses and porters, 2) The complexity of maintaining cold chains in a highly mobile setting yet with the continuous possibility of blockages through overflowing rivers, landslides, snowfall or stops of flows of electricity, horses and vehicles, 3) The complexity to have meeting points in time and space with highly mobile respondents within the complex interplays between altitude, horses, deities, bureaucracies, cordyceps etc. Finally, I will conclude with a brief account of how these interdependent territorializing and deterritorializing entities and processes have entangled our research and potential outcomes and findings into these complex interplays.
Bio:
Dr Wim Van Daele has a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies and Comparative Science of Cultures from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Ghent University in Belgium where which he specialized in the anthropology of food. His postdoctoral research at the ERC-funded Overheating project at the University of Oslo built further on medical anthropology studying the relationships between food systems, society and health in Sri Lanka. He was also a visiting researcher at the Food Studies Centre at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, the University of Chicago and Columbia University. In 2021, he became an associate professor in the Department of Nutrition and Public Health at the University of Agder in Norway, from where he currently leads the large FRIPRO-funded interdisciplinary EATWELL project on food (systems) in Bhutan, examining the socio-cultural and environmental aspects of food systems that shape nutritional intake and the gut microbiome. Dr Daele has been accepted as a visiting scholar at the University of Exeter and Oxford University for his sabbatical in 2026.