From the moment Haritha Govind began her graduate studies in the Division of Anthropology, she was committed to producing critical public scholarship that advances anthropological knowledge about food and identity and seeks to understand why people eat what they eat.
“Food in connection to identity has been on my radar as far as I can remember because it serves as a way to understand my family history and transnational lived experiences,” said Govind.
Govind was recently awarded the prestigious international Bill Whit Award for Master’s Thesis from the Graduate Association for Food Studies — the graduate student caucus of the Association for the Study of Food and Society — for her project, “I Am What I Eat: Vegetarianism and Identity Among South Indian Immigrants in California.”
Govind describes her work as “a digital humanities creative project that uses the website platform to explore how culturally specific food practices can be shared with a broader audience beyond anthropology.” She draws on the theoretical approaches of dietary thresholding and transnationalism to argue that “the South-Indian vegetarian experience is an active and individually specific process of deconstructing food practices and culinary meanings learned through childhood in India and reconstructing them as adults in a Californian context.”
Her project was based on ethnographic fieldwork with vegetarian-identifying South Indians in the Bay Area and Orange County. Over two years, she collected and analyzed ethnographic data through participant observation, field observation and informal interviews. Having experience with a digital humanities project through a previous Cal State Fullerton DEFCon Fellowship, Govind combined her knowledge and experience with graphic design, working out justifications for creative decisions that balanced prose and artistic representation. The final project includes several visuals, where Govind unpacks each dish, ingredient, food combination and crockery as a reflection of cultural decisions and family practices.
“I truly enjoyed reading each image as if it were a text in and of itself. My favorite plate picture in my project beautifully captures the confluence of traditional Tamilian recipes and health-inspired experimental cooking,” said Govind.
Govind plans to pursue a Ph.D. and expand on her ideas about new, creative and multimodal ways to share the anthropology of food and expand her understanding of vegetarian cultures beyond her own South Asian community.