Submit a response, of no more than 200 words, to the following question:What is commensality? Provide an example of commensality from the Week 1 readings.
Untitled 8 Submit a response, of no more than 200 words, to the following question: What is commensality? Provide an example of commensality from the Week 1 readings. Required reading: -Clifford Geertz, The Slametan: Communal Feast as Core Ritual, In The Religion of Java, New York: The Free Press, 1960, 11-15. -Eugene Cooper, Chinese Table Manners: You Are How You Eat. Human Organization, Summer 1986, vol. 45, no. 2, pp. 179-184. Week one lecture slides • Why do Javanese villagers hold slametan feasts, where most of the food remains uneaten? • Why do certain religions prohibit the eating of pigs, while others regard the cow as sacred, and in Western cultures, it is the dog that is not eaten? • Why do War’i people from the Amazon regret the loss of a practice they have been forced to give up? • Is the taste for sweetness universal? • How was the transatlantic slave trade organized in Liverpool connected to the Manchester capitalism and the sugar consumption among its working class? • Do you have any idea where the food you ate for breakfast comes from? • When did going out for coffee become a thing? • What shapes our taste, eating habits and practices? Are they purely individual, cultural or also based on socio-political and economic factors? • Have you ever noticed the differences between what men order and what women order when you’re out with friends or family? Is there still a difference? • What is fat prejudice? • How do smell, taste, and embodied cooking practices trigger memories? • Is eating the cuisine belonging to another culture the same thing as experiencing cultural difference? • What is an authentic cuisine? How defines authenticity? What kind of genre are cookbooks? • No definite answers to these questions • We will learn about some possible ways of thinking about these questions. How might we begin to answer them? How do anthropologists answer them? • This unit does not provide right or wrong answers. • People and the world too complex to answer these question based on a right or wrong dichotomy. Anthropology rather offers a broader perspective including different approaches, perceptions and experiences. • And so, we will engage in theorizing based on a variety of ethnographic case studies. What is anthropology? • Distinctive method developed in early twentieth century: participant observation (or, ‘observant participation’) • Requires long-term fieldwork • While ‘in the field’ the anthropologist participates in the everyday lives of the people s/he is studying • Participation = being involved, being immersed • Observation = keeping a record of all that is observed. These are called fieldnotes. Participant observation – a contradictory term?
Participant observation, a misleading term, since one cannot be actor and audience simultaneously. These roles are usually played successively. At times, anthropologists observe social engagements, like gatherings, political meetings, discussion groups and a whole range of other activities, private and public, and take notes, recording or taking photographs when allowed. At other times anthropologists participate in a broad area of activities, like preparing a meal, assisting in the preparation of life-cycle rituals, field trips, translating and editing texts, in private as well as in public contexts. Participant observation in action • In his article, ‘The vegetarian anthropologist’, David Sutton describes his fieldwork on the Greek island of Kalymnos • Kalymnians accepted his diet of fish and plant foods, as it evoked a nostalgia for a past way of life. • However, Sutton ‘made one crucial exception’, partaking of meat at Easter ‘showing myself to be a part of the human community’ • ‘I had instinctively decided to make this exception in order to be a full “participant-observer” in Easter celebrations.’ p. 6 Emergence of a distinctive method Bronislaw Malinowski with Trobriand Islanders (present day Papua New Guinea). Source: genealogyreligion.net • Participant-observation developed by early anthropologists such as Bronislaw Malinowski (pictured) • Malinowski was in the Trobriand Islands in 1914 when World War 1 broke out; he stayed for several years • Malinowski cautioned against having any contact with members of your own society • The anthropologist should strive to see things from the “natives’ point of view” • The language is outdated but this is still a powerful idea. ‘The field’ has changed, the method remains Blurring of boundaries between: • Home and ‘the field’ • The researcher and researched • The familiar and different • emic, from within the social group (from the perspective of the subject) • etic, from outside (from the perspective of the observer) Ethnography • So what becomes of these ‘fieldnotes’? • Anthropologists write crafted accounts of their time in the field • These are called ethnographies • Ethnographies include description but also analysis: theories are used to help the anthropologist make sense of the phenomena they studied • Specific focus might be: gender roles; experiences of illness and ideas about death; popularity of imported soap operas; sleep and dreams: the list is endless. Ethnography: • Ethnography is the analysis of a group, could be a family or a society, based on participant-observation and leading to a written account of a people, place or institution. • Ethnographies traditionally have focused in depth on a bounded and definable group of people. Today, they focus on a particular aspect of contemporary social life; such as new reproductive technologies, the meanings of the veil, virtual communication, or being an AFL club fan. • Reading ethnographies is a good way to learn how anthropologists conduct their research and how they reflect on their own and one other’s experiences in the field, and construct their broader theories. • Why are ethnographies important?
Ethnographies as texts offer excellent insight into how social anthropologists undertake their fieldwork, what it is like to experience daily life in an environment that may be initially unfamiliar, and the political, economic and social dynamics involved in collecting ‘data’. By providing specific, in-depth case studies, they can serve as excellent means for teaching about global issues such as climate change, migration and globalisation. Even where ethnographies focus on a particular practice - such as a religious ceremony, or a culinary ritual – the anthropologist will typically place the practice in its full context to give a holistic, rich and multi-faceted account. Contemporary anthropology is an approach that accepts the significance of subjective experience and the shared meaning for a group.
Food and fieldwork Life-cycle rituals and religious festivities • Births, Circumcisions, Wedding celebrations, Funerals, Sacrifice Feast (Eid al-Adha), Eid al-Fitr at the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan Sharing food in everyday life situations • Having tea and food in public spaces with interviewees • Being invited to the associations or informant’s homes and observe food preparations • Eating with informants at home • Sharing food with the group you are working with • Participating in cooking food at home • Talking about recipes and cookbooks Anthropology of food • Food is a basic element of material culture and social life and has always had a central place in the discipline of anthropology from its earliest days. • Anthropologists see food and foodways as tools with which to understand certain practices and societies situated in the context of global and historical flows and connections. • Commensality, eating together has long been seen both as a source and an expression of group identities. • Food is also an important indicator of social differentiation and social hierarchy, which entails class, status, and power and inequality. Anthropology of food • Food is never ‘just food’. It is about much more than nutrition and satisfying biological needs • Food marks social relations, expressing the differences, for example, between men and women, young and old. Food can express and cement relations of equality or hierarchy. • Food, then, is involved in boundary making. • ‘Food conveys meaning as well as nourishes bodies.’ Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik, Introduction to Food and Culture: A Reader, p. 2. (This book has been placed on Reserve) Constructing identity through food • Structuralist perspective developed by Claude Levi-Stauss, who identified that food can be seen as a language that expresses social structures and cultural systems. • Humans symbolically create identity through their food and drink choices. Our food choices serve to symbolize how we define ourselves in terms of religion, ethnicity, social class etc. and what we eat also communicates to others our beliefs, cultural and social backgrounds and experiences as well as boundaries. • ‘Food operates as one of the key cultural signs that structure people’s identities and their concepts of others’, (Xu 2007, 2). • ‘The history of any nation’s diet is the history of the nation itself, with food fashion, fads and fancies mapping episodes of colonialism and migration, trade and exploration, cultural exchange and boundary making’, (Bell&Valentine 1999, 69). Screenshot from a recent article by Tim Spector, image by Jeff Leach 1) Foraging / hunting and gathering: collecting wild vegetable foods, hunting and fishing 2) Horticulture / subsistence agriculture: working small plots of land, perhaps use of irrigation, draught animals, ploughs. Involves domesticated plants and animals. Image from 2015 Andrew Jacobs article about forced settlement of pastoralists in China. Image by Gilles Sabrie Pastoralism: Herding animals, nomadism, trade animal products to obtain other foods. 4. Intensive agriculture: farmers rely on specialised crops, make use of draught animals or tractors, irrigation
5. Industrial agriculture: use of machines powered by fossil fuels.