Visiting Scholar, Portland State University
Head Research , Green Shoots Foundation
Contributor, Platypus, The CASTAC Blog
Research Interests
Cambodia | Digital Ethnography | Digital Food | Digital Health | Ethnobotany | Food | Medical anthropology | Plant Humanities | Traditional Medicine |
About Ashley Thuthao Keng
Ashley "Thao" Dam is a medical anthropologist and budding ethnobotanist. Their research interests reside in the overlappings of nutritional anthropology, human ecology, gastronomy, and biocultural diversity. Thao also writes, draws, photographs and speaks about food on under the name @ThaoEatWorld. They are currently a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Anthropology at Portland State University. They are the co-founder of the plant humanities initiative "Plant Planet Plate" which uses science and storytelling to celebrate and conserve biocultural diversity. Previously, they were a Lecturer in Global Health at Maastricht University in The Netherlands and Explorer for the National Geographic Society.
Contact
Contributions to Platypus, The CASTAC Blog
View all of Ashley Thuthao Keng's posts on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.
Dining With Dogs: More-than-Human Relations in Food Media
Human and nonhuman lives may have first become closely entangled with the rise of agriculture as we raised both animals to eat and other animals that could help us manage the animals we raised to eat. However, the relationality between humans and animals has expanded beyond such survivalist functions. Today, we share our homes and, as we will discuss in this post, our food and eating practices with them as valued members of more-than-human families, co-participating and co-producing our complex and ever-evolving cultures surrounding food. (more…) (read more...)
Recipes of Resistance: Global Digital Gastro-solidarity for Palestine
From the North in Safad (where my father is from) and Galilee to the South East in Al-Lydd (where my mother is from) and down to Jerusalem and Gaza, the food differs but is united at the same time, through love and history… Palestinian food is found in the home. That is where it all begins. (Joudie Kalla, Palestine on a Plate, 2016) Food is the most precious part of Palestinian heritage. For Palestinian food not to go extinct, the young have to learn from the old. (Aisha Azzam, Aisha’s Story, film forthcoming 2024) Around the world, millions have taken the streets in support of a free and thriving Palestine in the face of active genocide and the continuance of settler colonial violence. Visible on the streets and all over social media feeds, scattered among flags and keffiyehs, are images of the vibrant watermelon. This trinity of nationalist symbols bear (read more...)
“Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?”: Food, Cooking, and Eating in Video Games
“Are you seriously telling me that this hot mash of mushrooms and fruit is going to completely heal his wounds?” (Gilbert 2019) It is summer 2020 and I, like many others, am sequestered indoors clutching my recently acquired Nintendo Switch playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons (ACNH). In wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, people around the world seemed to swarm either to their handy technological devices or towards the soothing arms of nature. Luckily for me, my technological device included encounters with some virtual greenery—the trees and flowers of my beloved tropical Animal Crossing island. (more…) (read more...)