A01=Amir Sayadabdi
Aotearoa
Author_Amir Sayadabdi
Bourdieu
Category=JBCC4
Category=JBFH
Category=JBSL1
Category=JBSR
Category=JHMC
Category=NHG
diaspora
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
food studies
forthcoming
Iran
migration
New Zealand
Product details
- ISBN 9781399542371
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 30 Jun 2026
- Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Food and the Iranian Diaspora critically analyses everyday life within the Iranian diaspora in New Zealand, with a focus on the generative role of food in the construction of a ‘diasporic Iranianness’. It shows how different aspects of identity, in particular gender and national identity, undergo reconfiguration and reconstruction within Iranians’ transnational and diasporic arenas of social interaction and modes of belonging. As the first ethnographic work on the Iranian diaspora in New Zealand, it uncovers how the community sustains cultural continuity, challenges exclusion and creates new forms of connection.
Amir Sayadabdi offers a three-part examination of how food practices shape and express diasporic identities through nation, gender and memory. Placing rich ethnographic research in dialogue with Bourdieu’s theories of habitus, capital and practice, he spotlights how everyday acts of cooking and eating become forms of belonging and resistance.
Amir Sayadabdi is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the Victoria University of Wellington. He is interested in anthropology of food and its intersection with gender studies, migration studies, and studies of race, ethnicity, and nationalism. He is the inaugural winner of the Neda Nobari Prize in Iranian Diaspora Studies, for the same work from which this book is drawn. He is also a board member of the Association for the Study of Food and Society (ASFS), is a member of the Editorial Collective of Commoning Ethnography and is the Associate Editor of the Food and Foodways series (Edinburgh University Press).
