Food (inter)activism in the Marquesas, French Polynesia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Systems of planetary health and justice are entangled via many different modalities, including food and the language we use around and about it.Environmental balance and human health are both influenced by our foodways (the practices, ideologies, and institutions through which food is produced, distributed, and consumed) and a range of associated discursive practices (Cavanaugh & Riley, 2023;Karrebæk et al., 2018).Relatedly, social justice is both mediated by and facilitated through food and the social interactions that take place through and around it (Broad, 2016;Dossa, 2014).Above all, the listening, reciprocity, and connections embedded in the multisensory aspects of quotidian foodways shape and perpetuate broader understandings of health and the environment.Food (inter)activism (Riley & Paugh, 2019) enlists food-related modes of social interaction in pursuit of food sovereignty, a goal that not only entails fair access to meaningful foodways but will also support environmental justice and health equity (Donaldson & Riley, 2023).This article offers a brief example of how the just production, circulation, and consumption of foods that are healthy for both the human body and the planet is being hampered by the slow violence (Nixon, 2011; see also Perley, this forum) of gastrocolonialism (see Chao, this forum) and the disruption of local foodway interactions in te Henua ò te Ènana (the Land of the People, commonly known as the Marquesas), a remote archipelago in the semiautonomous collectivity of French Polynesia.Our work with te Ènana ò te Henua (the People of the Land, or Marquesans) has revealed how the semiotic expression and exchange of meanings relating to food and foodways frequently reflects shifting Indigenous identities and values, highlighting the confluences and conflicts between cultural traditions and global health advocacy.Marquesans do not simply accept or reject the health discourses promoted by the French medical establishment.They build new approaches to healthy eating based on scientific medicine, transmitted knowledge about food and the land, and their own personal experiences.More specifically, these transformations emerge from multisensorial engagements with food that support four modes of semiotic discourse: (1) about food-from words and recipes to food-related cartoons and cooking shows, (2) around food-activities in its presence such as fishing, marketing, cooking, and eating, (3) through food-the dishes and foodways that express cultural values, and (4) as food-speech genres such as gossip or curses that can nurture or poison interlocutors (Cavanaugh & Riley, 2023;Riley & Paugh, 2019).We begin with a brief ethnohistory of how Western interventions have reshaped the Marquesas through the exploitation of marine resources (e.g., turtles and tuna) and arboricultural products (e.g., breadfruit, coconut, and noni fruit), while also affecting Marquesans through the imposition of foreign foodways.We draw on data from our ethnographic research to show how neocolonial capitalism continues to have an impact on evolving, interdiscursive village-level practices and knowledge concerning human health, the environment, and cultural sovereignty.By way of conclusion, we suggest how food (inter)activism can contribute to the regeneration of planetary health and justice in the Marquesas and beyond.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".