Culturae materia: Materiality, intergenerational conflict, and the negotiation of belonging in migrant families

Abstract

Intergenerational conflict in migrant families often unfolds through material arenas – objects, artifacts, and spaces – where cultural heritage and adaptation intersect. Yet migration studies still privilege values, norms, and talk over the material infrastructures that mediate everyday life. This article draws on extended ethnographic fieldwork with a Lebanese family running a long-established Italian restaurant in northern Italy to show how material culture operates as an active site of negotiation. The analysis develops five axes of intergenerational conflict in material practice through which foodways become both medium and battleground for identity, legitimacy, and modernity. Minute decisions about ingredients, techniques, and presentation recalibrate cultural boundaries and authority structures within the family and in the restaurant’s public positioning. By foregrounding food-related material culture as more than contextual backdrop, the study offers an analytical framework that may be useful for examining how migrant families negotiate the intertwined demands of heritage preservation, economic survival, and host-society recognition.