Scott Alves Barton, ‘Beyond the Columbian Exchange’

A talk on African Diaspora culinary cultural retentions as a cornerstone of the politics of identity, and in respect to stewardship of the environment, the planet and to each other. This material is broadly drawn from Scott’s research on the intersectional relationship between sacred and secular foodways in Afro-Brazilian communities in the northeastern regions of Brazil. He has also placed my research in conversation with Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical, ‘care for our common home’, or Laudato Si.SS

Scott Alves Barton is a Cultural Anthropologist of African Diaspora Foodways at Notre Dame, and was an executive chef for over 25 years. For nearly twenty years, Scott has researched sacred and profane foodways in Afro-Brazilian communities of northeastern Brazil. He has given acute focus to street food vendors, and the sacred cookery of Candomblé, Tambor de Mina adherents. Scott is a public scholar/artist at Lynden Sculpture Garden, Milwaukee. His forthcoming manuscript, Reckoning with Violence and Black Death follows his Lynden exhibition on Anti-Black violence, funerary foods and ancestrality, Buried in the Heart. Scott serves on several foodways advisory boards.