Re-engaging Foodways: Life-courses of Disconnection and Reconnection with Food, Environment, and Sociality in Hawai‘i

Abstract

ABSTRACT The article focuses on the centrality (and relationality) of food, environment, and sociality in the efforts of a group of education practitioners and learners on Hawai‘i Island to create a more liveable future alongside and despite global, social, and ecological upheavals. The ethnographic material stems from an engaged anthropological research on environmental knowledge and ‘āina-based education in Hawai‘i in early 2022 and digital anthropological encounters established before and after the onsite phase. Within this article we hope to convey the idea that, while the education practitioners and learners draw from knowledge of an ancient food system and even ‘restore’ parts of it, they do not simply replicate the foodways of the past by implementing them one-to-one. Rather, in their re-engagements of past foodways, people create social transformations and move through transitions in innovative ways in order to navigate through a contemporary world of disconnection and reconnection, continuity and disruption, loss and innovation, impoverishment and empowerment, as well as powerlessness and creativity.