Francophone Working Group
The WG reports about its 4th conference, jointly with the 34th conference of Euroethno, engaging with the theme of “Food cultures in Europe: everyday words and gestures”. The conference was held at the West University of Timișoara, Romania.
The 4th conference of the Francophone working group, SIEF (jointly with the 34th conference of the Eurethno, a French-speaking network for scientific and technical cooperation in ethnology and European historiography of the Council of Europe) was recently organized, from October 3rd until the 5th, 2024 at the West University of Timisoara (Romania). The theme of the current edition was Food cultures in Europe: everyday words and gestures. As previous conferences of the French-speaking academic network have already approach topics such as festive foods and diets specific to calendar rituals, it only seemed natural to broaden this subject and focus this time on everyday food, and get to compare various food cultures at a European scale.
The event brought together 30 participants from over twenty universities and research institutions in nine European countries (Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, Hungary, Italy, France, Poland, Romania, and Serbia), who engaged in passionate and delightful discussions that continued over coffee breaks, lunches and dinners, during which local delicacies were generously offered by the local organisers.
West University of Timișoara, situated, as the names indicates, in Western part of Romania, in a multicultural region, not far from the Serbian and Hungarian border, is a high education institution centred on the communities and the region it represents. Encouraging the research initiatives of its staff and international cooperation between researchers from all regions of the world, especially Europe, the West University of Timișoara takes pride into being a founding member of the European university alliance UNITA, alongside other universities from France, Italy, Spain and Portugal, and more recently from Switzerland and Ukraine.
The conference in Timișoara was impeccably organized and hosted by faculty members and students attached to the Research Center for Heritage and Anthropology (RHeA), led by professor Otilia Hedeșan, the head of the Romanian Association of Ethnological Sciences. This is the second successful SIEF working group conference organized in Romania, after The Ritual Year conference, held in 2018, in Bucharest. Both events prove that the key ingredients to a great event are communication, hard work and determination.
Irina Stahl
