ABSTRACT
What migrants bring to light about their global situation – social, familial, economic or cultural – in the country of immigration is not always the same as how they actually live on a day-to-day basis. Beyond images, words and the more or less standardised discourses glorifying the founding experience of migration that migrants willingly stress themselves, there is often a tremendous discrepancy between practice and daily life.2 Such a discrepancy, which exemplifies a classic methodological problem in anthropology – the distinction between what is told and what is done or felt – is by now relatively well documented as regards migrant populations.3 On the other hand, the social situation of returnees in the homeland is still of minor interest for anthropologists as compared with that of refugees,4 though of wider interest for the social sciences. This relative deficiency, varying in different regions of the world, is all the more regrettable in that ethnographical studies on returnees may contribute to the understanding of complex situations, in which the very processes of identity construction are at stake, through social stratification which is uplifting or degrading according to the state of the migrants or returnees. In this respect, the study of the food practices of returnees allows for questioning the interaction of migration with identity and with ‘traditional food’, notably, to what extent the social construction of migration, real or imaginary, is directly experienced through diet. Perception of migration, as success or failure, stems from the confrontation between what is eaten at home (here) and in the host country (there.) Food may provide a privileged access to a complete grasp of migrant identities ‘on the move’ or being constructed. In any case, a better understanding of the link between migration, food and identity allows for more accurate comprehension of the local significance given to ‘traditional food’, poverty and wealth and, more generally, to well-and ill-being.
