Food Assembled : Tracing Surinamese Food in Contemporary Dutch Spaces

This thesis follows the practical life of Surinamese food in the Netherlands. Through fieldwork conducted at markets, take-away shops and grocery counters, it traces how meals are assembled, ingredients selected, and routines sustained across postcolonial space. Rather than approaching food as a marker of identity or cultural expression, the study attends to preparation, repetition and handling. The work is grounded in Actor-Network Theory and the empirical philosophy of Annemarie Mol, with methodological commitments to observation, sensory mapping and descriptive writing. Surinamese dishes such as roti, pom and heri heri appear not as fixed traditions but as meals in motion, held together by gestures, tools and infrastructures shaped by histories of migration and colonial entanglement. The thesis offers a situated account of diasporic food practice, attentive to material specificity and partial coherence.