Elena Neri is a PhD candidate specialising in the anthropology of food at the Department of Nutrition and Public Health, University of Agder. She is currently a visiting researcher at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology, Leiden University, where she is supervised by Erik de Maaker, until May 2026.

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Elena Neri is a PhD candidate specialising in the anthropology of food at the Department of Nutrition and Public Health, University of Agder. She is currently a visiting researcher at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology, Leiden University, where she is supervised by Erik de Maaker, until May 2026.

She is involved in EATWELL, an interdisciplinary project funded by the Norwegian Research Council that examines food and more-than-human health across multiple sites in Bhutan. Elena is currently writing her thesis, drawing on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a community of rural villages in western Bhutan.

Her research focuses on how the local food system is transforming as this community moves from subsistence farming to a cash-based economy, in the context of broader socio-ecological changes such as climate change and increasingly stringent Buddhist guidelines. She is particularly interested in how these shifts reshape relationships between people, landscapes, plants, animals, deities and other beings. These dynamics are examined through practices of cultivation, cattle rearing, foraging and ritual life. Approaching food from a material-semiotic perspective, her work engages with its social, ecological, health, microbial and religious dimensions and their entanglements. Among the food-related themes that most interest her are multispecies life cycles and processes of consubstantiation between beings.