Canned Empire: Corned Beef, Infrastructure, and Everyday Life in Southern Africa and Polynesia

This project examines contemporary food systems under conditions of global transformation, focusing on the increasing reliance on imported processed foods in regions shaped by colonial histories and structural dependency. It conceptualizes food systems as infrastructures, understood not only as material networks of production and distribution, but also as social and everyday practices through which food becomes available and meaningful. The project takes canned corned beef as a strategic analytical entry point. Although seemingly mundane, this commodity embodies the historical entanglements of empire, industrial food production, and global trade, and today circulates widely in geographically remote and economically marginalized regions, where it plays complex and often ambivalent roles in everyday life. This study draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork among San communities in the Kalahari, alongside field research in South Africa as a site of production, and incorporates historical analysis and a commodity chain perspective. It examines how such global commodities are incorporated, reinterpreted, and contested in everyday life. It adopts a comparative framework focusing on Southern Africa and Polynesia, two regions where historically shaped asymmetrical relations continue to be reproduced within regions, to explore how these conditions are lived and reworked in different contexts. By linking global processes with everyday practices, the project contributes to an anthropological understanding of how power, dependency, and agency are negotiated within contemporary food systems.