Food

The following readings will be briefly summarized:

1) Anne Allison: Japanese Mothers and Obentos: The Lunch-box as Ideological State Apparatus

In this 15 page paper published in Anthropological Quarterly Vol 64 (1991), Allison describes the cultural meanings ascribed to Obentos, arguing that 1) it socializes children and mothers into the gendered roles and subjectivities, 2) it is the first step in a child's acculturation to "shudanseikatsu" (group living), 3) the labour inherent in obento making is a representation of an "ideal type" protestant ethic that mum and child strives towards, 4) the emphasis of Japanese education on a child's performance at routines 5) the Obento cookbook subculture and the subordinate, traditional role of mothers in modern Japan, 6)the obento mum as constitutive of female gender roles.

The reading is pleasant; although when one uses complex sounding sociological terms to talk about food, absurdities will always result. Two are extremely eye catching:

"(japanese dishes...) are arranged in an array of small, separate containers...unlike...American cuisine. Consequently the eye is pulled not toward one totalizing center but away to a multiplicity of de-centered parts".

"What is consistent in Japanese cooking generally, as stated earlier, are the dual principles of manipulation and order". 

2) Arjun Appadurai: Gastro-Politics in Hindu South Asia

An extremely good reading that lays out the theoretical foundations of "gastro-politics" in a genuine and sincere way without sounding too much like IAE, or, in the language of Leach, like "a game of acrostics in which appropriate words have been slipped into the vacant slots of a prearranged verbal matrix". Appadurai argues that food can be a powerful semiotic device that "presupposes and reifies technological arrangements, relations of production and exchange, conditions of field and market, and realities of plenty and want." Food, to Appadurai, is a "highly condensed social fact".

Factors that account for the variety and intensity of communicative tasks performed by food in South Asia: ecohistory - because of the fact that South Asia has been for thousands of years as a mainly agricultural society, and that agrarian surpluses are precarious and uncertain, food has become a powerful symbol of sharing, redistribution and power. The Jajmani system, or the Indian social caste system, was an economic system where lower castes performed various functions for upper castes and received grain in return.

1) Food is imbed with moral and cosmological meanings in South Asian civilisation. "In a real sense, in Hindu thought, food, in its physical and moral forms, is the cosmos."

2) The main regulatory force in food relations: transfer, exchange, transaction, circulation.

3) Argues that food in South Asia can serve "two diametrically opposed semiotic functions": "indicate and construct social relations characterized by equality, intimacy, or solidarity", or, "sustain relations characterized by rank, distance or segmentation".  He ponders the plausibility of Marriott's notion that "intimacy and rank are positively correlated", such that "the more unequal the transacting dyad the more likely their food transactions are to be intimate", saying that "this may well be the case", but adds his own take of diametrically opposed functions.

Appadurai then proceeds to study the gastro-politics of the Tamil Brahmin households. Certain principles are outlined, below are the most important two: 1) Social precedence in the food cycle is based on age and sex grading with primacy generally going to the older and male members of the hearth group. 2)The husband's relatives always rank higher and are hence accorded precedence in the serving and eating of food. Following that, Appadurai outlines a few reasons why conflict (gastro-politics) might occur: first, when one or more of the relevant principles is inherently ambiguous; second, when two of the principles are in apparent contradiction in a particular context; and third, when, though the principles are clearly grasped, incumbents of key roles are in conflict over actual gastronomic compliance with the expectations associated with these roles.

Example of first reason (ambiguity): when a man's daughter marries his wife's brother's son (cross-cousin marriage). In this case, the wife's brother used to be subordinate in this "brother-in-law" relationship - now due to superiority of wife-takers over wife-givers, there is a subtle shift in rank.

Example of second reason (contradiction): when a meal is served, should priority be given to the 30-year-old younger brother of the head of the household or to the 70-year-old maternal aunt of the female head of the house? Appadurai: there is no answer, depends on "whose annoyance is easier to live with".

Example of third reason (non-compliance): classic mother-in-law, daughter-in-law dynamic.

Appadurai then concludes, as part of the end to this chapter, that "at a household level, gastro-politics is not only about issues of rank, but is also a semiotic mode for enacting conflicts over roles, for resolving or exacerbating ambiguities about rules, and in general for debating and refining the fine points of the most intimate commensal context."

He then moves on to look closely at how gastro-politics play out in a marriage feast and in a temple setting. In many occasions, tensions manifest in trivialities such as one party usurping primacy by sitting in inappropriate places of honour, by loud complaints of quality of food. Of course, it might seem trivial, but in gastro-politics, they serve to illustrate the inherent tensions of the kinship structure. Food transactions can also become sensitive instruments of intercaste rankings.

Finally, Appadurai claims that the elaborate rules that surround food in virtually every South Asian
context are culturally organized efforts to compensate for this biophysical pro-
pensity of food to homogenize the human beings who transact through it. Because food becomes one and the same substance once digested, humans culturally add on to it to make it different. This argument is plausible and sounds interesting, but there is no singular reason why such a compensation is necessary: indeed the people engaged in the practice themselves certainly do not think of their actions as acts of compensation for homogeneity. Such is the kind of observation that can only be made by an "independent" researcher.

The conclusion is particularly interesting, and will be reproduced in full here:

Gastro-politics for Hindus, then, is rather like what Clifford Geertz (1973:412-453) has argued about cockfights for the Balinese: it is "deep play." It is a species of competitive encounter within a shared framework of rules and meanings in which what is risked are pro- found conceptions of self and other, high and low, inside and outside. In a society in which the self is a complex and unstable entity, rank is destiny, and exclusiveness is survival, these stakes are high indeed. Transactions around food represent, in Hindu society, perhaps the central currency of such "deep play" precisely because food is built into such a variety of arenas.

These transfers of meaning are encoded in the language of sharing, of connubium, of left- overs, and of worship which appear, in indigenous discourse, in every food-related do- main. Food may generally possess a special semiotic force because of certain universal prop- erties, as I argue at the beginning of this essay. But this special force must always remain tacit until it is animated by particular cultural concepts and mobilized by particular social contexts. To extend this analysis of Hindu gastro-politics would require a comparative in- vestigation of the relevant meanings and contexts in other cultures.