Legal Pluralism, Cultural Governance, and the Postcolonial Politics of Food Heritage and Folklore in Bangladeshi Statehood

Abstract

Food habits in the marginalized communities of Bangladesh are closely related to culture, eco-knowledge, and spiritual faith; e.g., Santal, Chakma, Bengali Hindu community, and the Rohingya. However, such systems are now in conflict with State laws, particularly the Food Safety Act of 2013, which sets the standards of public health that disregard culturally necessary modalities, fermentation, cooking in clay pots, and foraging. The present study adopts a qualitative approach in the form of semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions, and policy actor interviews among the four communities. The analysis was conducted with NVivo coding and an inductive analysis approach and identified the recurrent themes of food sovereignty, cultural survival, and legal pluralism. Findings demonstrate that traditional practices are quite critical in keeping culture and tradition, but they are frequently lost in the quest by the government to standardize and promote health. Indicatively, open-fire cooking and fermentation, which form the backbone of the foodways of these people, are deemed as unsafe by the existing rules, which could impose change or even secrecy. These obstacles made participants emphasize their ability and determination to defend their heritage and continue lobbying to achieve food sovereignty and culturally relevant policies. The paper indicates that the introduction of a standardized set of rules that could be used in all agroecologies could be unsuitable, as there is a great range of food systems that are dominant in Bangladesh. To fill this gap, an idea of safety with heritage is provided in the paper to expand the process-oriented safety standards to protect the food without removing the cultural practice. It is a non-discriminatory and nutritious model of food governance that aims at protecting the health of both the population and the marginalized group, and that aims at preserving and participating in their food culture.