SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Since the wars of the 1990s and breakup of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, tourism in the Croatian region of Istria has rebuilt with a quality turn towards cultural, rural and gastronomic tourism. This thesis considers the considerable economic, political, social, and demographic changes in the region over recent decades through the lens of food, examining how food producers experience Istria’s “gastronomic turn”. It asks what, and who, makes certain foods and cuisines “local” and “special”, and for whom. It finds that dominant actors define, inscribe and govern Istrian cuisines and specialities in ways which follow the French concept of terroir—fixing relations between people, place and food. This causes tensions for the producers at the heart of this thesis, who know and value food relations differently. The dense and slippery concept of domaće (usually translated as “homemade”) emerges as an important way in which people negotiate these tensions, critique changing conditions and shape alternatives. The thesis contributes an ethnography of producers’ experiences of the cultural economy of food in a post-socialist borderland region to the anthropology of food and scholarship on contested belonging and identity in the wider region. It makes the case for taking vernacular concepts like domaće seriously to counter the global dominance of terroir and understand the nuances of relations between people, food, place and value