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Jean-Jacques Boutaud, Anda Becuţ, Angelica Marinescu Food and culture. Cultural patterns and practices related to food in everyday lifeInternational Review of Social Research , 2016
As an everyday activity, sustaining our life, eating experiences reveal complex relationship between food and society, involving material and symbolic aspects of cultures, dietary order, but also aesthetics or hedonism (Levi-Strauss, 1964, Douglas, 1966, Fischler, 1980, Beardsworth & Keil, 1997). Bringing on stage cultural values, food becomes a central identity marker, defining personality, social class, lifestyles, gender roles and relationships, from family, to community, to ethnic groups or nationality, changing through time and place. Food is a lens to analyze society order, historical changes, power and politics, if we think of the pioneering works in this area of studies, from Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of the social classes’ taste (1979), Jack Goody’s connection between cuisine and class in West Africa (1982), Sidney Mintz research on sugar, modern times and colonialism (1985), to Arjun Appadurai’s work on nationalism and cuisines (1988). The more recent trend towards food heritage and heritagisation reveals the dynamic role of history in understanding culture, as well as the marketization of culinary traditions. Social changes, like evolutions in intergroup relations within societies, migration phenomena such as nomadism, refugees, expatriates, tourism, alongside with the industrialization of food production or the globalization of foods, the role of mass media and new technologies, all have their impact on the food production, distribution, preparation, foodways or drinkways changing either by expressing individual or group preferences for alternative consumption manners, or at collective level. This issue on ‘Food and Culture. Cultural patterns and practices related to food in everyday life’ gives, once *Corresponding author: Anda Georgiana Becuţ, National Institute for Research and Cultural Training, Ministry of Culture, Bucharest, Romania, E-mail: [email protected]. Jean-Jacques, Boutaud Universite de Bourgogne Angelica Marinescu, University of Bucharest more, reason to Roland Barthes who, in his introduction to Brillat Savarin’s Physiologie du gout, understands food, generally (and gastronomy, particularly) as a domain fit for developing a humanistic approach, seen as total social fact, including different metalanguages. As he explains, ‘It is this encyclopedic view, - this ”humanism” - that encompasses, for Brillat-Savarin, the name of gastronomy” (Barthes, 1975).
Cooking' Life: The Vibrant Entanglement of Food and Human Life in Sri Lanka2013
This monograph is the result of numerous interactions and transformations. It is an assemblage of conversations, travels, books, observations, experiences, encounters, and food that all transformed into the energy and ideas crystallised into this book. It is impossible to acknowledge the impact of everybody and everything that has shaped this work, so I will restrain myself to expressing my gratitude to some people who made all this possible yet, not bearing any responsibility for the actual content. The people not mentioned here are no less important, as this monograph would not have been the same without their contribution. The influence of some has been very particular and my foremost gratitude goes out towards my eldest host-brother and true friend who welcomed me into his lifeworld and the circle of family, friends, and village. He and his family have generously offered me their care, friendship, food, and a place to live while sharing their thoughts, feelings, and domestic intimacy. Without my host family, I would not have had the opportunity to meet so many helpful, knowledgeable, and kind people in the village of research where I have always felt truly at ease. These villagers and my host family members have been my true teachers. My friendship and gratitude also extend to all of my other Sri Lankan friends and acquaintances who have made me feel at home in their country. My research in Sri Lanka has also been made possible by Center Leo Apostel (CLEA) at the Free University of Brussels (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, VUB) through which I received funds from the G.0293.08 scholarship of the Flemish Research Fund (Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek, FWO). At CLEA, I have been supervised by Jan Broekaert who is affiliated with the Department of Mathematics and with whom I had truly inspiring interdisciplinary conversations. I also had several enriching and supportive exchanges with Diederik Aerts, Nicole Note, Gert Goeminne, and several other colleagues. Peter Scholliers affiliated with the Department of History and chair of the Social and Cultural Food Studies centre has likewise been a very supportive co-supervisor. Koen Stroeken from the Department of Languages and Cultures at Ghent University has been my main supervisor and 'inspiritor' in my joint PhD between the VUB and Ghent University. Moreover, I have been able to count on true inspirers who have in a way acted as informal supervisors in which I particularly think of René Devisch, and also Olivier Servais and Mathieu Hilgers. iii René Devisch helped me establish contact with Judith Farquhar with whom I had a very stimulating collaboration during my six-month stay at the Department of Anthropology of the University of Chicago as a non-degree visiting student. I am very thankful for her very to-thepoint remarks that pushed my research further and for her generosity in introducing me to numerous people. Hence, I have had several fascinating conversations with some other scholars, such as Jean Comaroff and Steven Scott, and some students, such as Jolie Nahigian, Larisa Jasarevic, and Duff Morton, who has been so kind to review parts of this monograph. Also Chelsie Yount has generously shared her comments that have helped me to better formulate my ideas. I also thank Koen Stroeken for putting me in touch with Rane Willerslev who initiated a magic circle to present my work and who introduced me generously to several people at the cultural history museum, including Øivind Fuglerud, Tatiana Tereza Kuldova, and Anders Rasmussen during my three-month stay in Oslo. Tereza further introduced me to the South Asian workshop where I was also given the opportunity to present a paper and where I received a lot of engaging comments, for instance from Pamela Price, Ruud Arild Engelsen, and Claus Peter Zoller. I have also very much appreciated the opportunity Clemens Saers and Heidi Brautaset have given me to stay at their house during this period. I am very indebted to Kimberly Trathen for her unlimited effort in the minute editing of this entire work and her careful comments she shared along the way, both of which helped to articulate my ideas in clearer and less complex ways, even though I have persisted in my wordy formulations at times. Also Vito Laterza has generously shared his powerful and creative ideas that have continued to inspire me. There are several more people with whom I have had illuminating conversations with, such as Martin Holbraad, Henrietta Moore, and Jonathan Spencer as well as the people that I met during my one-week visit at Johns Hopkins University where I was warmly welcomed by Veena Das, Sidney Mintz, Ananad Pandian, and Neena Mahadev whom I met earlier in Sri Lanka together with Bart Klem. I also wish to express my gratitude to all the reviewers of my submitted articles for their constructive comments that have helped shape this monograph. Last, but not least, I thank my father, mother, brother, sister, and all my friends who have kept their patience while enduring my PhD-related conversations and who have continued to support me in my passionate endeavour. and political registers. Besides their common preoccupation with excessive desire, kapurālas and activists share a concern with the insecurities, precariousness, and detrimental effects that arise from such unbalanced forms of desire. The kapurāla traced the economic hardship of our neighbouring family back to the presence of pretas. A more Marxist oriented social movement organisation, such as the Movement for National Land and Agricultural Reform (MONLAR) in Sri Lanka, would rather blame the family's precarious economic situation on the inequalities emerging from the neoliberal economic impetus to consume, compete, extract from the poor, and accumulate capital incessantly and in excessive ways. So, we can see the two common concerns with desire and insecurity being shared by ritual specialists, afflicted people, and activists, even though these are being differently articulated. Generally stated, the villagers, ritual actors, and activists share an analysis of defining the situation of social change as precarious. All respond to it by creating a space to transform the situation. In everyday life, this attempt consists of negotiating well-being by way of procuring, preparing, and consuming healthy and tasty food, whereas in ritual, the spirits are summoned to provide protection and help in cultivation and life-transitions. In activism, this space is created by communicating the analysis to influence policy-making to positively affect the wider community. Whether or not these practices are in vain matters less than the mediation established between the visible, tangible, and practical world, on the one hand, and the invisible world of global forces or spirits affecting the former, on the other. This mediation of seemingly opaque forces and the tangible pragmatics of life have particular salience for people trying to make sense of transitions and seeking to transform these in beneficial ways as to sustain and regenerate life. The cluster of all these similarities and differences among the various tropes of human action in everyday, medical, ritual, and activist life constitute the basic template of this research. The events of crisis, diagnosis, and response described above form a key fragment of social, ritual, and domestic life that emerged from a ten-month fieldwork in a Sinhalese village of about 80 families in the Kurunegala district in the NorthWestern Province of Sri Lanka. Earlier I had carried out a three-month MA dissertation research in 2004, and worked and lived in Colombo for five months in 2006. After my ten-month fieldwork, from October 2008 until August 2009, I returned for another period of six months to conduct research on food activism in Colombo in 2010. The maps of Sri Lanka and the area of my main fieldwork-site are given below.
Srividya Venkataraman
