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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 XXXXXXXXXX.
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
egard 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
eakfast 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
ased on a right or wrong dichotomy. Anthropology rather
offers a
oader 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
oad area of activities, like
preparing a meal, assisting in the preparation of life-cycle
ituals, 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
e a full “participant-observer” in Easter cele
ations.’ p. 6
Emergence of a distinctive method
Bronislaw Malinowski with Tro
iand Islanders (present
day Papua New Guinea).
Source: genealogyreligion.net
• Participant-observation developed by early anthropologists such as
Bronislaw Malinowski (pictured)
• Malinowski was in the Tro
iand Islands in 1914 when World War 1
oke
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
emains
Blu
ing 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
ounded and definable group of people. Today, they focus on
a particular aspect of contemporary social life; such as new
eproductive 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
oader 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 cele
ations, 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
oundary 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 i
igation, draught animals, ploughs. Involves
domesticated plants and animals.
Image from 2015 Andrew Jacobs article about forced
settlement of pastoralists in China. Image by Gilles Sa
ie
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,
i
igation
5. Industrial agriculture: use of
machines powered by fossil fuels.