A Tale of Three Habas Pejtos, Or, How to Make a ‘Plurinational’ Cuisine

Dear Reader: As I write this essay, I am sitting at my desk in Cochabamba, Bolivia. My window looks over a sunny park, frequented by families with young children on the weekends. A few miles away, the mountains that surround the valley rise up sharply, climbing to some 4000 meters above sea level from the approximately 2700 meter elevation where I sit. A handful of books are lined up in front of me, leaning against the wall across the back of my desk. Among the titles are histories of Bolivia, a few ethnographies, ethnobotanical references, and Quechua-language texts.

My theory books are back home, in boxes, or pushed to the backs of dusty bookshelves. Apart from my personal e-archive of coursework notes, the only grand theorist who managed to accompany me in extended version is Marx – and even he is filtered through the reading, literal and figurative, of David Harvey on a CUNY podcast. I

I say this by way of introduction, and perhaps as a bit of a disclaimer. Here in Cochabamba, I have just passed the halfway point of my dissertation fieldwork. All going well, my stay here should result in a multi-disciplinary thesis: part ethnobotany, part food-security/nutrition, and part ethnography. The premise is to explore the relationships linking agrobiodiversity - or native and traditional Andean crops - to food security and food culture, in this city and the nearby rural area of Colomi.

Although the components of my project seemed quite clear and discrete prior to fieldwork, from where now I sit, they look more like a jumbled-up pile of notebooks and grey literature, scribbled phone numbers, and sketched-out timelines. Drawing from ethnographic data gathered over the last year, the paper you're about to read is an incipient attempt to trace a few of these threads through to an end-point, or at least a good point to pause.

As is perhaps appropriate to this stage in the dissertation process, I'm currently wrangling with whether and how the theory that permeated the first years of my PhD is useful for understanding the complexities of life in situ. For better or worse, I'm also pondering some existential questions about ethnicity, inclusion, and the "strange bedfellows" of movement building.

What's written here will likely form the basis of a dissertation chapter, but this seems quite far off into a hazy, post-fieldwork future. Right now, it is more description than citation; more ethnography than theory; more "raw" than "cooked." I hope that these first reflections will nonetheless make some useful contributions to our dialogue in New Haven. My thanks to you for reading.

Alder Keleman, PhD candidate, Yale University, in a joint program of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, the Department of Anthropology, and the New York Botanical Gardens Ms. Keleman’s multi-disciplinary thesis research examines the relationships linking agrobiodiversity to food security and food culture in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Previously, Ms. Keleman worked in applied agricultural development research at the UN FAO, CIMMYT, and IPGRI.

Food Sovereignty: a critical dialogue, 14 - 15 September, New Haven.