Abstract
What does it mean to spatialize food? Why combine such an analysis with law, or with signs and spaces? Leveraging Peircean-inspired legal semiotic theory, the spatialized nature of food will serve as a porthole through which a semiotic view of the spatial dimensions of legal experience can be discerned and elaborated. Specifically, case studies of the simultaneously material and immaterial aspects of food will support an analysis that seeks to open avenues of conceptualization regarding categories. The semiotic nature of both food and law will drive a discussion of the “dis-composition” of categories. Though such an effort may appear overly scholarly and far from pragmatic, exactly the opposite claim will be made. Case studies such as that of the “Meatball Wars” will illustrate in plain terms how subject position struggles for space cannot be adequately addressed within traditional disciplinary boundaries. The essay will conclude with a demonstration of how a “discomposing” semiotic approach has the potential to serve as a means of enabling conflict resolution on a broader scale. The overall investigation is motivated by the struggle within academia – seen across the humanities – to rethink traditional foundational assumptions and dichotomies. The argument seeks to ground itself in the interconnectedness increasingly advanced, joining scholars who insist on the importance of anthro-historical context, local particulars, and the impossibility of assuming an objective position that can coolly observe phenomena from “outside.”
References
Abbots, Emma-Jayne & Anna Lavis (eds.). 2013. Why we eat, how we eat: Contemporary encounters between food and bodies. Farnham: Ashgate.Search in Google Scholar
Abrams, Phillip. 1982. Historical sociology. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Liquid modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.Search in Google Scholar
Braverman, Irus, Nicholas Blomley & Davud Delaney (eds.). 2014. The expanding spaces of law: A timely legal geography. Stanford: Stanford University Press.10.11126/stanford/9780804787185.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Brillat-Savarin, Jean Anthelme. 1826. Physiologie du gout, or meditations de gastronomie transcendante. Rungis Cedex: Maxtor.Search in Google Scholar
Delaney, David. 2010. The spatial, the legal and the pragmatics of world-making: Nomospheric investigations. Abingdon: Routledge.10.4324/9780203849101Search in Google Scholar
Henare, Amiria, Maritin Holbraad & Sari Wastell (eds.). 2007. Thinking through things: Theorizing artefacts ethnographically. Abingdon: Routledge.10.4324/9780203088791Search in Google Scholar
Latour, Bruno. 1991. We have never been modern, Catherine Porter (trans.). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Lefebvre, Henri. 2004. Rhythmanalysis, Stuart Eldon & Gerald Moore (trans.). London: Bloomsbury.Search in Google Scholar
Massey, Doreen. 1995. Spatial divisions of labor: Social structures and the geography of production. New York: Routledge.Search in Google Scholar
Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Andreas. 2015. Spatial justice: Body, lawscape, atmosphere. Abingdon: Routledge.10.4324/9781315780528Search in Google Scholar
Ricca, Mario. 2013. Culture interdette: Modernità, migrazione, diritto interculturale. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri.Search in Google Scholar
Ricca, Mario. 2014. Intercultural law, interdisciplinary outlines: Lawyering and anthropological expertise in migration cases before the courts. E/C (March). 1–53. http://www.ec-aiss.it/index.php accessed 20 December 2018).Search in Google Scholar
Ricca, Mario. 2015. United Europe and Euclidean pluralism: On the anthropological paradox of contemporary EU legal experience. UNIO EU Law Journal 1(1). 3–26.10.21814/unio.1.2Search in Google Scholar
Ricca, Mario 2016. Klee’s cognitive legacy and human rights as intercultural transducers: Modern art, legal translation, and micro-spaces of coexistence. Calumet. http://www.windogem.it/calumet/upload/pdf2/mat_51.pdf (accessed 20 December 2018).Search in Google Scholar
Ricca, Mario. 2017. How to make space and law interplay horizontally: From legal geography to legal chorology. Available at: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2926651 (accessed 20 December 2018).10.2139/ssrn.2926651Search in Google Scholar
Ricca, Mario & Adriano Cancellieri. 2015. Ubiquità planetaria nei condomini: Microspazi di convivenza, corologia interculturale e diritti umani. Calumet. http://www.windogem.it/calumet/archivio_single.asp?id_art=33&lang=ita (accessed 20 December 2018).Search in Google Scholar
Shepherd, Gordon. 2012. Neurogastronomy. New York: Columbia University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Slocum, Rachel & Arun Saldanha (eds.). 2013. Geographies of race and food: Fields, bodies, markets. Farnham: Ashgate.Search in Google Scholar
Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. 1997. Connected histories: Notes towards a reconfiguration of early modern Eurasia. Modern Asian Studies 31(3). 735–762.10.1017/S0026749X00017133Search in Google Scholar
Yotova, Maria. 2013. It is the bacillus that makes our milk: Ethnocentric perceptions of yogurt in postsocialist Bulgaria. In Emma-Jayne Abbots & Anna Lavis (eds.), Why we eat, how we eat: Contemporary encounters between food and bodies. Farnham: Ashgate.Search in Google Scholar
© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston