SIEF 25th International Ethnological Food Research Conference
ZRC SAZU, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 15–18 September 2026
Locations: Atrium ZRC (Novi trg 2), Gosposka Hall (Gosposka 16), Prešeren Hall (Novi trg 4), ZRC SAZU, Ljubljana, Slovenia
For four decades, Ray Oldenburg’s “third place” — informal public spaces beyond home and work — has shaped how scholars imagine urban conviviality. Yet the concept was theorized in mid-twentieth-century North America, where neighborhood sociability was assumed to flow among culturally similar locals. Even then, it was colored by nostalgia for venues Oldenburg saw as disappearing in the television age. What becomes of the third place in the dense, mobile, multi-ethnic neighborhoods of contemporary cities, where migration reshapes who cooks, who serves, and who belongs at the table?
Drawing on more than a decade of public ethnography in Nishi-Ogikubo, a Tokyo neighborhood with an unusually thick ecosystem of small independent eateries, this talk reframes the urban third place as an infrastructure of care. I argue that small restaurants, bars, and cafés do more than host conviviality; they actively produce it through everyday acts of attention, hospitality, and craft. Owners and regulars together cultivate what I call “craft as care” — gendered, embodied labor that knits diverse strangers into provisional communities. This care work becomes especially visible, and especially fragile, at the seams where migration meets locality. The question is one of how far care and conviviality can extend to newcomers, and what additional forms of emotional labor are required, both of owners and other patrons.
Drawing also on a comparative project tracing migrant restaurateurs across Asian and European cities, alongside fieldwork observations from other urban sites, I show how migrant-run eateries simultaneously extend and complicate the third-place ideal: offering refuge and recognition for newcomers while testing the elasticity of neighborhood belonging. Bringing these cases into conversation, I propose that the urban third place be reconceptualized not as Oldenburg conceived it as a stable container of conviviality and local identity, but rather as an ongoing social achievement — relational, embodied, and laboriously maintained.
Food consumption is an important social practice that shapes the lives of individuals and communities across diverse social environments. Food serves as a bridge that connects people and diminishes cultural, social, and gender differences, while also functioning as a marker of distinction and separation.
The shared consumption of meals, together with its widespread popularity and prevalence, was already recognised in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century accounts of Slovenian life as an important element of social life and conviviality. Their authors frequently highlighted the pronounced hospitality of the Slovenians and the lavishness of festive meal preparation, even in contexts characterised by limited resources. This practice has persisted to the present day and represents a form of conspicuous consumption and social positioning.
Meals and food have long played a significant role in Slovenian social life, particularly when consumed outside the home. Inns, taverns, and restaurants were not merely spaces of sociability, but also places where new dishes, flavours, and cultural practices, values, and beliefs were encountered. These venues helped shape contemporary Slovenian cuisine through the introduction of new ingredients and food practices.
This talk examines the principal characteristics of the Slovenian dining table, with particular emphasis on its role in the formation and consolidation of communities. Particular attention is given to shared meals around the inn table from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s, when dietary patterns characteristic of the contemporary Slovenian cultural sphere began to take shape.
In this talk, I argue that cultural, artistic, and civic action are crucial for addressing our current disconnection from the food system. Expanded understandings of foodscapes and conviviality are helpful to operate a shift where food is no longer approached primarily as an edible object, a commodity, or as a lifestyle choice, but as a social and environmental relation shaped through a multiplicity of encounters. Foodscapes –the lived and imagined landscapes where the material, symbolic, experiential, and discursive dimensions of food intersect, intertwine, and co-evolve– make the encounter possibilities visible in a concrete register, rooted in the real world. Conviviality is understood here as the art of making room for humans and non-humans, for new stories and trajectories. This presentation explores how convivial activations –situated and intentional interventions within the realm of food and culture– can foster inclusion through practices of sharing, recognition, and mutual learning, while remaining fragile, unequal, and vulnerable to commodification and political capture.