Nir Avieli is a cultural anthropologist and the President of the Israeli Anthropological Association. He is a senior lecturer at the department of Sociology and Anthropology, Ben Gurion University, Israel. Nir has been conducting ethnographic fieldwork in the central Vietnamese town of Hoi An since 1998. His book: Rice Talks: Food and Community in a Vietnamese Town (2012, Indiana University Press) is a culinary ethnography of Hoi An. His articles on Vietnam were published in the Journal of Material Culture, Ethnology, Annals of Tourism Research, and The Journal of Heritage Tourism among others. Nir conducted ethnographic research in Thailand, India, Singapore and Israel. He is forthcoming book: "Food and Power in Israel", (University of California Press 2017) is based on multi-sited ethnography conducted in Israel since the late 1990's. Nir convened the International Conference on "Food, Power and Meaning in the Middle East and Mediterranean" (Ben Gurion University 2010) and edited two special issues for the Journals Food, Culture and Society and Hagar. In 2015 he edited a special issue on "Everyday Life in Contemporary Israel" for the journal Ethnologie Francaise. Currently he is conducting an ethnographic study titled "Food for the Body and Soul", on the Food, Identity and Cosmology of the African Hebrew Israelite Community. Nir is working toward a new ethnographic project on "Food and Crisis at the Margins of Europe".