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This introductory chapter focuses on the construction of food as heritage, and on the powerful entanglements of food, heritage and nationalism of the 19th and 20th centuries. Drawing on the rich, interdisciplinary, global scholarship of the last twenty years, it provides a broad European picture. It covers the recent food wars, the uses and misuses of food in banal nationalism, as well as its abuses in the mixophobic nationalism by European populist movements. Food nationalism has been marked by ethnicity and is highly gendered. Women wrote cookery books which provided an all-pervasive approach, widely upheld by middle-class families, leading to national styles of cooking. Yet writing about national cooking tended to be based on the invented traditions of an unreflective nationalism, failing to acknowledge the long entangled history of exchanges and transfers in food and the way it was cooked. The Columbian exchange was but one of many instances of translation, connection and hybridization. Empires, migrations, diasporas and exiles, as well as globalization brought not only new produce but also new ideas of cookery reshaping ways of cooking and eating all over Europe and beyond ; This is the introductory chapter to the book Food Heritage and Nationalism in Europe edited by Ilaria Porciani. This book is a result of the European Union- funded Horizon 2020 research project CoHERE (Critical Heritages: performing and representing identities in Europe). CoHERE received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 693289.

Food inventories created from below, being less rigid and prescriptive, may enhance the perception of food as an immaterial heritage that is decisive for collective identity, but also syncretistic, elastic, mobile, open to exchange, happenstance and alteration. Perhaps this road is better than the political way of certifying, which anchors the gastronomic heritage to fixed identities, "cultures" dangerously bound up with ethnic belonging which itself is seen as static and not – as is the case – the upshot of constantly changing events and stories. The doubt is whether heritage conservation in a museum framework may actually be breeding new intolerance and new nationalism, perhaps under a different name. That is why it so important to steer all discussion of origins, traditions and heritage onto a time and not space dimension, history not geography. ; This is the final chapter odf the book Food Heritage and Nationalism in Europe edited by Ilaria Porciani.

Food Heritage and Nationalism in Europe contends that food is a fundamental element of heritage, and a particularly important one in times of crisis. Arguing that food, taste, cuisine and gastronomy are crucial markers of identity that are inherently connected to constructions of place, tradition and the past, the book demonstrates how they play a role in intangible, as well as tangible, heritage. Featuring contributions from experts working across Europe and beyond, and adopting a strong historical and transnational perspective, the book examines the various ways in which food can be understood and used as heritage. Including explorations of imperial spaces, migrations and diasporas; the role of commercialisation processes, and institutional practices within political and cultural domains, this volume considers all aspects of this complex issue. Arguing that the various European cuisines are the result of exchanges, hybridities and complex historical processes, Porciani and the chapter authors offer up a new way of deconstructing banal nationalism and of moving away from the idea of static identities. Suggesting a new and different approach to the idea of so-called national cuisines, Food Heritage and Nationalism in Europe will be a compelling read for academic audiences in museum and heritage studies, cultural and food studies, anthropology and history. Chapters 1,2,4,6 and 12 of this book are available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. They have been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

Food Heritage and Nationalism in Europe contends that food is a fundamental element of heritage, and a particularly important one in times of crisis. Arguing that food, taste, cuisine and gastronomy are crucial markers of identity that are inherently connected to constructions of place, tradition and the past, the book demonstrates how they play a role in intangible, as well as tangible, heritage. Featuring contributions from experts working across Europe and beyond, and adopting a strong historical and transnational perspective, the book examines the various ways in which food can be understood and used as heritage. Including explorations of imperial spaces, migrations and diasporas; the role of commercialisation processes, and institutional practices within political and cultural domains, this volume considers all aspects of this complex issue. Arguing that the various European cuisines are the result of exchanges, hybridities and complex historical processes, Porciani and the chapter authors offer up a new way of deconstructing banal nationalism and of moving away from the idea of static identities. Suggesting a new and different approach to the idea of so-called national cuisines, Food Heritage and Nationalism in Europe will be a compelling read for academic audiences in museum and heritage studies, cultural and food studies, anthropology and history. Chapters 1,2,4,6 and 12 of this book are available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. They have been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

This publication is produced within the three-year research programme EuNaMus – European National Museums: Identity Politics, the Uses of the Past and the European Citizen, coordinated at Tema Q at Linköping University (www.eunamus.eu). EuNaMus explores the creation and power of the heritage created and presented by European national museums to the world, Europe and its states, as an unsurpassable institution in contemporary society. National museums are defined and explored as processes of institutionalized negotiations where material collections and displays make claims and are recognized as articulating and representing national values and realities. Questions asked in the project are why, by whom, when, with what material, with what result and future possibilities are this museums shaped. This Open Access publication presents key findings of research undertaken by the Eunamus consortium in its attempts to understand the 'museology of Europe'. This notion is used here to describe activities which are peculiar to museums and which result from the manner in which museums assemble and deploy objects. This idea can also be used to understand the museological aspects of the city, in which architecture, buildings, monuments, parks, piazzas and boulevards become curated objects. The museological aspect explored here also acts as a counterpoint to the narrative tradition in museums, explored elsewhere in the work of Eunamus. This research investigated the ways in which the city, online museum-like spaces, and national, regional and local museums produce opportunities for connecting identities. A study of national art museums and capital cities, for example, sought to understand how acts of nation making also produced a sense of Europe and of a shared European identity. This aim addressed a central purpose of Eunamus research: to understand how the portrayal of history in national museums could contribute to greater European social cohesion.

How we define border studies is transforming from focussing on "a line in the sand" to the more complex notions of how constituting a border is practiced, sustained and modified. In the expansion of borders studies, the areas explored across Europe and Asia have been numerous, but the specific themes that arise through comparative case studies are novel when approach Europe and Asian borderlands. Comparing the border experiences in East Asia and Europe in a number of thematic clusters ranging from economics, tourism, and food production to ethnicity, migration and conquest, Borders in East and West aims to decenter border studies from its current focus on the Americas and Europe