Midterm Weeks 1-6 PDF

WEEK 2 - “FOOD AS A SYMBOL & RITUAL” Douglas, Mary. 1972. “Deciphering a Meal.” Daedalus 101 (1): 61–81. ➔ Meals are coded messages and reveal social information - codes are multiple and categorized. ➔ Food categories create “boundaries” lines the communicate what is a “whol...

WEEK 2 - “FOOD AS A SYMBOL & RITUAL” Douglas, Mary. 1972. “Deciphering a Meal.” Daedalus 101 (1): 61–81. ➔ Meals are coded messages and reveal social information - codes are multiple and categorized. ➔ Food categories create “boundaries” lines the communicate what is a “whole” “complete” or good meal ➔ When categories get mixed, then it compromises the completeness or “purity” of a meal. CODE 1: WHAT IS IN ONE KIND OF MEAL? WHAT MIGHT BE THE INDIVIDUAL MEANINGS ASSOCIATED WITH THOSE ITEMS? CODE 2: WHAT CATEGORIES OF FOOD EXIST IN A DISH? Stressed = Central parts of Dish Unstressed = Side Dish CODE 3: WHAT ARRANGEMENTS OF PEOPLE AND TOOLS ACCOMPANY DIFFERENT MEALS? 1. Settings (Plates, bowls, banana leaves, pots, etc) 2. Seating (Chair, pillows, tables, etc.) 3. Comuncal vs. individual (shared plates, individual plates, eating with people, eating along) 4. Utensils (Chopsticks, forks, hands, etc) CODE 4: HOW IS THE TIMING OF EATING ORDERED IN A MEAL? Eg. Appetizer, Entree/Main, Dessert, Beverage CODE 5: HOW ARE MEALS ORDERED DIFFERENTLY THROUGHOUT THE DAY? WHAT IS IN THOSE MEALS THAT IS DIFFERENT FROM DISH TO DISH? wHAT ACCOMPANIES THESE DISHES? CODE 6: HOW ARE THESE MEALS ORDERED ACROSS AS WEEK? CODE 7: HOW ARE SPECIAL MEALS SET APART FROM DAILY LIFE? CODE 8: HOW ARE MEALS AND FOODS CODIFIED IN GENERAL? CODE 9: HOW ARE MEALS DEFINED AGAINST EDIBLE THINGS THAT ARE NOT CONSIDERED MEALS? CODE 10: HOW DO MEALS CATEGORIZE WHAT IS EDIBLE AND WHAT IS INEDIBLE? (What wouldnt be in a meal?) - Who eats with who? - Flavours/textures? - Hot/Cold meals? - Family Dish/National or regional cuisine? 2. Whats in a Meal? ➔ Meals are shared “grammars” that communicate different meanings ➔ A meal is not defined as a combination of ingredients but defined across the many contrasted and complementary “orders” of codes discussed just like languages. 3. Food as a symbol ➔ Like language, meals and food having meanings because they are symbolic, symbols are abstract meanings anchored in concrete forms ➔ Food are big symbols because they are concrete necessities for human life everyday ➔ They are not only symbolic as individual objects, but also as dishes that symbolice national, ethnic, or political belonging For example Stews: Multiculturalism and stews: - “Eureka Stew” (Australia): Multicultural identity, but who gets to stir or decide what’s added to the pot? - Ajiaco (Cuban stew) : Symbolices “mixing” of Cuban peoples across class, race lines; flavours represent different groups of people that change and mix over time. ➔ Food also helps us make concrete abstract ideas about diversity, health, and identity in a manner that we consumer ➔ Thus our bodies beome what we eat and the symbols attached to them ➔ If we eat “Bad” things, then we also consume all the negative symbolic associations of those foods 4. Food as Ritual ➔ Meals are such effective cultural grammars because they “repeat” (we eat every day, just in different formats) ➔ “The meaning of a meal is found in a system of repeated analogies. Each meal carries something of the meaning of the other meals….” Rituals are repeated cultural activities that order social experience - They are “special” (set apart from everyday life) and “mundane” (happen in everyday life - Rituals are different than personal routines; they coalesce particular meanings between people (collective activities) - Meals are generally ritualistic  Garth, Hanna. 2019. “Alimentary Dignity: Defining a Decent Meal in Post-Soviet Cuban Household Cooking.” ➔ Struggle for a decent meal ➔ “The concept of a decent meal involves a cuisine that not only provides adequate nourishment, but also implies the ability to assemble a meal that is perceived as categorically complete with starch, beans, mean, and vegetable components and the opportunity to serve an aesthetically plated meal” “Alimentary dignity” foods that sustain not only their bodies but their cultural meanings and connections “The notion of alimentary dignity address the aesthetic and moral imperative to meet cultural standards for food consumption and the ability to create meals that are desirable, enjoyable, and that one if proud to serve others” ➔ Categories between ‘Real” food and “trash”/”crap” Categories in decent meals symbolize “real” Cuban society (solidarity, collectivity, sacrifice for the greater good) and compromised Cuban society (commodified, selfish, unequal) ➔ The notion of alimentary dignity and insistence on consuming a decent meal is part of how Santiagueros make meaning out of Cuba’s changing political and economic situation and for the reductions in the socialist entitlement system. For some the desire for alimentary dignity is also an implicit critique of unmet promises and the shifting relationship between the state and the people in Cuba As rituals they are repeated reminders of these values, and when people struggle in these daily rituals those struggles intensify the multiple categories of meanings attached to a meal. Summary: - Meals are complex and interconnected sets of categories a=that define what is edible, good, meaningful - Categories enforce boundaries (between people and foods) that carry social repercussions when transgressed - They are powerful because they are SYMBOLIC (represent many related meanings) and REPEATED (Ritualistic and ordered to deal with uncertainty) - When people struggle to put together a decent meal, it intensifies the meanings attached to those dishes (representing “order”) in people’s attempts to grapple with “disorder” WEEK 3 - COMMODIFYING AND STANDARDIZING FOOD Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power (1985) ➔ Sugar as a colonial “commodity” ➔ Useful but luxurious before, now it is an everyday cheap necessity The “Columbian Exchange” in the 15th Century - Transfer of plants, animals, diseases and technology between the Old World (Europe, Asia, and Africa) from which Columbus came and the New World (North and South America and Australia and New Zealand) which he found. Continuing on Mintz: ➔ In Europe: Sugar as medicine/preservative (up to ~17th century) Sugar as confectionary/luxury (~13th century) Sugar as a “sweetener” ( 17th century onwards) Exponential growth in Sugar consumption - Why? Sugar as “raw commodity” Sugar Plantations: Saint Dominque (Haiti); Martinique; Barbados; Jamaica; Puetro Rico, Antigua; Trinidad and Tobago. ➔ Sugar as “proletarian hunger killer” ➔ Demand for “sweetness” transformed into a necessity ➔ Sugar is a world people can no longer with without Industrial Foods ➔ Sugar - Raw material “commodity” ➔ Food Commodity Chains 1. Producer 2. Distributor 3. Retailer 4. Consumers Continuing on Industrial Foods Atlantic fish caught by larger haulers (lots of different fish) → frozen blocks of fish for transport→purchased at port→sent to processing centre→band-sawed→breaded (preservatives added) →fried→refrozen→ packaged→shipped→merchandised in grocery freezers→sold→stored in home freezer→baked at home→eaten Josephson, Paul R. 2008. “The Ocean’s Hot Dog: The Development of the Fish Stick.” Technology and Culture 49 (1): 41–61. “In this environment, food processors sought to convert new techniques and products that grew out of military rations and meals into a ‘peacetime market for wartime foods,’ with a focus on ‘pre-cooked’ products. To promote these new products, processors promulgated a strategy of mass marketing, new menus and recipes, and new products, including the fish stick” (Josephson 2008, 47–48). “The daily life conditions of consumption have to do with what I call inside meaning; the environing economic, social, and political (even military) conditions with outside meanings” (Mintz 1996, 20). Two concepts: Inside and Outside meanings Inside meaning: refers to the personal, cultural, or symbolic significance that individuals or groups attach to their consumption habits in everyday life (How people interpret and give value to what they consume. Outside Meaning: Refers to the broader structural factors - Such as economic, social, political or military conditions that shape and influence these consumption patterns. Summary: ➔ Industrial and global food commodity chains are formed out of historical developments (colonial, capitalism) ➔ Everyday diet changes and takes on new meanings (Inside and outside) ➔ Industrial/processed foods are not inherently good or bad, but are often formed from complex or unfair labour practices ➔ Our worlds are irreversibly shaped by these foods. WEEK 4: COMMENSALITY AND SHARED FOOD COMMENSALITY = PRACTICE OF EATING TOGETHER Commensality: “The action of eating together” (Block, 1999, 133) - Determines degrees of intimacy and distance - Sharing “Comming substance” to bond with others #SwedenGate Issue Public outcry from a viral Reddit thread (in 2022) on how in Sweden, a child’s friend (guest in a family home) may not necessarily be asked to join in their friend’s family meal ➔ Public Response Themes: - Attempts to make the “strangely familiar” or overcome “culture shock” - Explaining Swedish historical context (poverty) - Cultural meanings of food 1) As a material for “bonding” 2) As “resources” ➔ Accusations of racism or strategic exclusion Maurice Bloch ➔ Anthropologists studying agriculture, primarily in Madagascar ➔ “Commensality and poisoning” 1990 Commensality ➔ Kinship as the most basic unit for shared blood, procreation, identity, and sharing food ➔ Kin : Strangers :: Sameness: Difference ★ “Eating the same food unites the bodies that eat together and eating different foods distances them” (138) Linda Johansson (2022) on #SwedenGate in The Independent: ★ “The Swedish thinking goes like this: the other child (or the other family) may have plans for another kind of dinner, and you wouldn’t want to ruin the routine or preparations. I don’t think it is anything to do with not wanting to feed the other child or because it costs money or anything like that, it’s more to do with tradition and wanting to eat with your own family. Compare Kinship in Madagascar ➔ Eating together extends or expands kinship bonds from the immediate family to the extended family (Bloch 1999, 142) “[...] we must not forget that eating together is not a mere reflection of common substance, it is also a mechanism that creates it” (142) ➔ Is every instance of inviting someone to share a meal therefore an act of expanding kinship bonds? Not necessarily! ◆ Who (or what) do we invite to share meals with us? Friends Coworkers Mentors/bosses/teachers Romantic partners Ancestors/spirits ◆ We have to share foods with others that are not our immediate kin; involves some risk or spirit of “adventure” 2. Sharing with Others - Risks of bonding with others you don’t know very well - Friendship in Bra, Italy. Not Purely intimacy or distance, but rather effort, work or obligation 3. The Work of Commensality ➔ Commensality as a form of work ➔ Yucatex Maya women in Mexico (Lauren A. Wynne  ➔ Women hate making tortillas, but they are a staple substance of achieving “commensality” in the home ★ “[...] the production, preparation and consumption of food are also intimately linked to community and cosmological wellbeing. For the Maya, food practices have long been thought of as essential human contributions to the cycles of life that characterize the universe” (Wynne 2015, 385) Tortillas or corn as “social conductors” (Bloch 1999, 135) Social Conductor meaning: Refers to how certain foods or eating practices facilitate social interactions, cultural connections, and the transmission of values or traditions. It is a medium through which social relationships are built, maintained, and expressed. “How do we reconcile this clear preference for the taste of handmade tortillas with some young women’s professed disavowal of the work that produces them?” (Wynne 2015, 391) “I hate it” ➔ Commensality as care/pleasure and struggle/exclusion ➔ Cammensality through changing kin roles/gender ideals ➔ Commensality as competition and status SUMMARY: ➔ Commensality as a term to describe the sharing of substances, meanings, and identity between people ➔ It is not only a ritual or process but an activity or work ➔ Commensality works to maintain sameness or difference ➔ Paying attention to practices of commensality for anthropologists ILLUMINATES core meanings and values, the boundaries of kinship, and changing hierarchies and status between people WEEK 5: SENSING PEOPLE, PLACE AND MEMORY Senses: ➔ What kinds of sensory engagements do we have with food? ➔ How are senses linked to culture, place, and memory? ★ Do people smell, taste, and categorize senses tied to food in the same way? ★ How do senses invoke other social phenomena (memory or place)? ★ How are sensory engagements codified/materialized? Basic Western European Sense Model >>>>> Separation of senses in language (English): ◆ I “heard” or I “listened to” the sizzle of meat searing ◆ I “smelled” onions cooking ◆ I “tasted” grassy notes in a cheese ◆ I “touched” or “squeezed” the pear for ripeness ◆ I “felt” the heat of the oven ◆ I “saw” the egg whites are still runny ➔ Other languages you may be familiar with, how are senses divided/represented? Compare to Italian or Spanish (Walmsley) ➔ Sentire (to feel hear, smell, sense) e.g. “I felt the saltiness of the dish; vs. I tasted the saltiness of the dish) ➔ How about flavours or tastes? How are these normally categorized? Separation of flavours ◆ Salty ◆ Sweet ◆ Sour/Acid ◆ Bitter ◆ Umami ➔ What about spicy (piquant)? Rancid? Cloying? Fatty/lipid? Others? Senses: ➔ Senses are often linked to pleasure, enjoyment, or socialized/bodily effects: - We like food because we have sensory engagements with it - Particular flavours or senses have good/bad effects (tell us what to eat, under what conditions, and what not to eat) - The rotten egg smell of chicken: What does this suggest to us? - Hearty broth - Bitter foods and medicinal qualities ➔ Sensory engagements with food because historically “biologized” (rendered as a chemical, genetic, or neurological relationship) and thus “reductive” - Assumption: People are ‘hardwired” to taste and sense, thus most sensory engagements can be linked to “brains” “taste receptors” “genes”, “neurology” - Classic example: Cilantro/Coriander tastes like soap “ These people have a variation in a group of olfactory-receptor genes that allows them to strongly perceive the soapy-favoured aldehydes in cilantro leaves” 2. Senses ➔ Steven Shapin (Historian of taste, senses, and sensory sciences at Harvard) People don’t taste the same way across history “Galenic Vocabulary”: Humoral/health dimensions of food senses/ flvaours from Greek antiquity 1. Sensory categories: Hot, cold, moist, dry 2. Leeks: Hot/dry  3. Melons: cold/moist Antiquity: Modern period (1600s): Senses were not discriminated against; acceptance that they all depended on one another through contact with consumed substances Pursuit of flavour/taste/sensory experiences predicated not on personal preference or pleasure, but the needs of the body ◆ Humors kept in balance; foods meant to respond to individual and personal dryness/moistness/heat/cold of a body at any one given time ◆ Temper and appetite likewise needed to be managed; was one more predisposed to heat/dryness? How did appetite/pleasure need to be managed to not upset this balance? ◆ Harmony, pleasantness, satiating, minimizing excess Creating tastes, flavours, and effects through “cooking”: ◆ Application of heat outside and inside the body (through the digestive process) ◆ “Saltiness” doesn’t mean anything except in relationship to the body and to notions of health: does saltiness help to imbue “heat” if the body is cold? How does saltiness get rendered in particular ingredients? (for example, by eating fish or by adding salt granules)? Aesthetics and Synaesthesia ➔ Aesthetics: How people MAKE sense (not just “visual senses)” ➔ Ordering of perception, sensory experiences, and appreciation ➔ How senses are codified, categorized, and “properly” differentiated Food is inherently Synaesthetic - the mixture or blending of perception and senses - Food makes us all Synaesthetes Synaesthesia: ➔ David Sutton Food anthropologist writing about Kalymnos (Greek Island) - Synaesthesia: Term describing when people can perceive overlaps in senses Sutton’s point: Synaesthesiaa is not “medical” it’s a common and culturally determined order of senses for describing flavours and engaging in cooking practices in Greece - Ex: “Hearing Flvaour” Synaesthesia of food comes from the “Whole” World that a given food (its smell, flavours, skills) allow people to recollect/connect too. We’re not just sensing overlapso of different kinds of perceptions, but also associations with memory, family, community, identity, nation. “Returning to the whole” to overcome displacement, fragmentation, through senses and memory ➔ Proust’s madeleine: tasting food involves involuntary recollection (Rataouille example) ➔ Example of pestellomata (pieces of the home or homeland) that help people connect to the “whole” world of these memories Memory in pestellomata linked to “place” ◆ “Sensory knowledge is ingrained in people through their socialisation in particular cultural settings. This early embedding of sensory associations leads to visceral responses to tastes and smells throughout a person’s life, which identifies him or her with the cultural environment in which he or she was raised.” (Walmsley 2005, 44). ◆ “Emplacement,” how people are sensorially connected between bodies, minds, foods, and environments Esmeraldas (in Ecuador), senses linked to foods, cooking skill, identity, and place, leading to sazón (good flavour) Something and someone can both have good sazón How senses are socialized from person to person ◆ Generational transfer of knowledge and experience in meals, kitchen spaces, with specific objects (e.g. æbleskiver pan), repetition of the “whole” through meals ◆ Cookbooks and recipes as a way of “teaching” sensory and embodied relationships to food Linking them to memory, place, identity Takeaway: 1. Sensory perception if not purely “natural” but cultural 2. In different historical and cultural contexts, people order and engage with sensory dynamics of food in often very different ways 3. Sensory engagements with food dont only produce “Pleasurable” experience, but connect to the “Whole” social worlds those senses/flavours/smells help to recall 4. Senses are thus social tools-learned, codified, and made meaningful to connect people to abstract concepts of memory, identity, and place.