Abstract: The main issue explored in this thesis is how and why food is used as a channel through which everyday identities are informed and elaborated. The thesis explores when, how and in which circumstances food and the activities involved in its preparation, consumption and exchange can be used as vehicles for identities. My ethnographic focus is on the Jewish population of Thessaloniki, the largest and most economically viable city of Northern Greece. The Jewish past of this city is quite remarkable: the Thessalonikian Jews remained a significant part of the overall population and existed continuously until early twentieth century. Dramatic events during the twentieth century and in particular the coming of Asia Minor refugees in 1922-3 and the Second World War in 1939-45 caused significant upheavals and resulted in a radical reduction of the city's Jewish population. My ethnographic data confirm that this turbulent history is reflected in the construction of present-day Thessalonikian Jewish identities. Food and the associated activities like preparing, serving, eating, talking and remembering through food are explored as meaningful contexts in which the Jews of Thessaloniki make statements about their past, create their present, construct or reject collective identifications, express their fears and preoccupations, imagine their future. The identities of my informants were multiple and complex. Being Jewish interacted with being Sephardic, Thessalonikian and Greek. In the thesis I argue that food was a way of experiencing and expressing these identities. I use the term "community" cautiously since it fails to reflect the complexity of Thessalonikian Jewish experiences and the varying degrees of identification by individuals with that community. Different degrees of belonging are considered in relation to gender, age, economic and social status. Therefore, the ambivalence or often the reluctance of Jewish people living in Thessaloniki to be identified as members of "a community" is an important theme of the thesis. Another important theme discussed is the tension and the overlapping between religion and tradition meaning kosher diet and Sephardic food as it is translated and perceived by the Jewish people themselves.
Abstract: This thesis examines the mediation of the nation-state as a dimension of the diasporic
experience of place. It focuses on the consumption of mass-media about Israel or
originating from it by people residing outside of the country. I understand this
mediation to take place continuously throughout the day, in multiple spaces, through
different technologies. As such, it forms part of the experience of place in mediasaturated
(urban) environments, allowing for a distant nation-state to become
embedded in daily routines. In order to theorise this experience, I draw on MerleauPonty’s
phenomenology, which understands place through embodied perception and
habit, and on studies of diaspora and media, which examine the social meanings and
uses of media among specific transnational groups. This qualitative project is based
on a researcher-absent exercise and extended interviews with British Jews and Israeli
immigrants in London. Analysis reveals that orientation includes four areas of
practice: investing and withdrawing emotions as part of managing ‘care’, searching
for truth, distinguishing between ordinary and extraordinary time, and domesticating
media. Some of these practices may be particular to the case of Israel, but some are
shaped by discourses around insecurity, rather than Zionism itself. Others appear to
be related to experiences of migration and diaspora in general. I argue that these
practices are ‘orientational practices’ in which people endeavour to make sense of
spatial positioning through negotiating distance and controlling media. I theorise
media as ‘orientation devices’ in diasporic everyday life, but ones that are unstable,
contested and reflected upon, and hence never fully habituated. The resulting
experience is one of increased reflexivity about everyday place and, paradoxically,
increased dependency on media for orientation. I conclude by suggesting that
practices of orientation point to a mode of being in place in globalisation that is not
sufficiently addressed by the dominant understanding of ‘belonging’.
