Post-Conquest Early Changes in Phyto-cultural Systems from the Analysis of Food: A Synthesis for the Argentine Arid Diagonal with Emphasis on the “Gobernación de Tucumán”—Governorate of Tucumán

Abstract

The historical development of societies involves continuities and discontinuities in its political, economic, and other sociocultural aspects, which are associated with different situations arising both from the environment in which they are inserted and from the relationships established with other social groups (García Canclini 1990). These restructurings to new situations can be studied from different variables and food is one of them. The term food is understood here as an action that transcends the nutritional needs of feeding, and refers both to the ingredients themselves, and to the ways in which they are prepared and consumed—in the form of meals and drinking—as well as to the contexts in which eating takes place—space, time, actors, tableware used, among others (Capparelli et al. 2015 and bibliography cited therein).