In this thesis, I investigate and critically analyze the relationship between foodways and identity for diasporic Iranians in New Zealand. My main objective is in-depth exploration of the role of food and foodways in (re)construction of a diasporic identity, (re)creation of a sense of belonging, and (re)building the feelings of ‘home.’

Drawing on Bourdieu’s (1977, 1979) theories of habitus, capital, practice, and field, I understand migration, in part, as a disruption of practice and habitus that occurs due to disruptions to foundational fields and ‘misalignments’ with new and emerging fields, potentially fragmenting the sense of self and leading to a heightened reflexivity and intentional identity performances as a consequence. I argue that food and food practices can be deployed as a means of attempting to create a ‘fit’ between field, capitals, dispositions, reflexivity, practice, identity constructs, and thus habitus, in especially the process of striving to achieve a new sense of belonging and feelings of ‘being at home’ in two worlds. I also demonstrate that Iranian migrants develop multiple, shifting, and evolving capital configurations which reflect their different practices in and between different social fields – in the form of a habitus clivé or cleft habitus (Friedman, 2016). This development enables Iranian migrants to effectively and innovatively operationalize their divided habitus in new sociocultural conditions, and to both consciously and unconsciously negotiate multiple, and at times contradictory, aspects of their (i) national identity (manifested in making intentional distinctions between ‘Persian’ and ‘Arab’ food; associating Iranian food and foodways with a collective, imagined, ancient past; publicly consuming ‘non-Islamic’ food items such as pork and wine as a way to cope with the existing negative stereotypical images concerning Muslims in the West); (ii) gender identity (manifested in women’s voluntary pursuit of the food practices that were perceived, prior to migration, as ‘oppressive,’ but were now deemed as a means of agentic liberation; women’s gaining respect, status, and symbolic capital in the community for cooking archetypical/authentic Iranian dishes; men maintaining traditional gender binaries in the domestic arena or within the Iranian community, yet publicly engaging in ‘feminine’ foodwork in front of a Western audience in order to fit in); and (iii) associated memories of home origins (manifested in deploying food-from-home(land) and collective rituals of home (i.e. nazri) as affective blocks of ‘home-building’ that not only reproduces the familiar, secure, communal, and hopeful ‘feelings of being at home’ (Hage, 1997; 2010) but also serve as a means of selective, remediating recollection of a sanitized and idealized version of the pre-diasporic past

which articulates the idealized genuineness of the pre-migration ways of life, thus generating a 'better' present/future in New Zealand).

I contextualize this by presenting a general description of the Iranian diaspora and their status in New Zealand, a general description of Iranian foodways in diaspora, and an analysis of the integral role of food and its symbolic dimensions in the (re)formation and (re)construction of different aspects of identity. I used ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative methods, including semi-structured, in-depth interviews, informal conversations, and participant observation in private and public spheres.

I argue that decoding the food and eating practices of migrant communities via ethnographically based research will extend the basic tenets of ethno-gastronomy and result in better and deeper understandings of the food and identity dialogics of migrant and diasporic populations. There are very few anthropological studies on the foodways of minorities and immigrant communities in New Zealand (particularly with Middle Easterners whose communities have until relatively recently been small and emerging in New Zealand). This research provides insight into effective community development strategies that could underpin the future well-being of migrants and their communities in New Zealand.