Dr Wim Van Daele

Wim Van Daele obtained a Master of Social and Cultural Anthropology in 2001 and a Postgraduate degree in Cultures and Development Studies in 2005 at the University of Leuven in Belgium. In 2008, he embarked on a joint PhD between the Center Leo Apostel for Interdisciplinary Studies at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Ghent University, obtaining with greatest distinction the titles of PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and PhD in Comparative Science of Cultures at Ghent University. During his PhD, Wim studied the ways in which food shapes life throughout its everyday, ritual, medical, and political-economic tropes. As such, he gradually noted the multiple entanglements of food with very diverse aspects of life and moved from studying food as a topic towards conceptually developing food as a methodology of social, interdisciplinary and intercultural research. He approaches food as an assemblage of the heterogeneous components of life with which food connects and which it holographically condenses. With this conceptual tool we can explore in novel ways societies and their multiple interrelations that are constantly being reshaped in collaboration with food.

Wim is currently a postdoc at the University of Oslo as part of the ERC-funded project ‘Overheating: The three crises of globalisation’ which is headed by Thomas Hylland Eriksen. He takes his conceptual development of food further by exploring food as a specific, pressing, and tangible vehicle with which to study the three crises of globalisation—economic, environmental, and cultural. This is possible given that food is an assemblage of components articulated with these crises at multiple levels, all connected with desire in both creative and destructive forms. In Sri Lanka and anywhere else, food is indeed a matter of increasing concern as it is connected and subjected to climate change and other environmental hazards, the monopolisation of food supply by agri-businesses, and a destructive overheating or burning of culturally relational ways of being by way of excessively incited desires (e.g. sorcery attacks motivated by jealousy, capital accumulation, etc.). Given food’s centrality to the desire for sustenance and regeneration of human (ways of) life and interrelations, and the connection of food to these crises that are catalysed by these destructive forms of desire, it carries these issues into the existential, intimate, and visceral domain of relational human being. In sum, food as an assemblage that holographically condenses these crises turns into a potent matter of concern that offers a taste of the crises and dynamics of globalisation as experienced in the Sri Lankan flesh.