Kinship and Food in Southeast Asia (review)

This edited volume, Kinship and Food in Southeast Asia, brings together ten ethnographic contributions on Southeast Asia that analyse how kinship is created and manipulated through the ways food is produced, consumed and shared. A unifying supposition of the contributions is that kinship cannot be analytically reduced to biological relationships but includes other forms of "relatedness" of which biological connections are one facet. This is particularly relevant in Southeast Asia where kinship ties are not fixed at birth, but continually created in an ongoing process, mediated through food consumption. Each of the contributors emphasises the malleability of kinship and the particular role of food in defining and consolidating kinship relations.

In the Introduction, Monica Janowski addresses an intriguing puzzle about the importance of rice in insular Southeast Asia. Although rice is native to mainland Southeast Asia, it is far more difficult to grow rice in the equatorial latitudes of the insular areas and the Malay Peninsula. Nevertheless, rice is an important alimentary and cultural resource in these regions. Janowski argues that this paradox makes sense when the symbolic value and significance of rice are analysed alongside nutritional necessity. By emphasising the symbolic and cosmological meaning of foodstuffs, the book draws on the theoretical tradition of the Comparative Austronesian Project initiated by James Fox at the Australian National University (ANU), which developed a comparative framework and interdisciplinary approach to exploring common themes among Austronesian-speaking populations. In this edited volume, this comparative approach is particularly constructive as it brings together seven examples from Austronesian-speaking groups in Indonesia and Malaysia, a case study from Northeast Thailand, and one from Papua.

A vast number of Southeast Asian societies attach unique symbolic significance to rice because it is associated with generative and transformative qualities — with fertility, nurturance or life force. Several of the authors explicitly refer to the Comparative Austronesian Project to expand this point by drawing on the concept of the "flow of life". Carol Davis demonstrates in chapter four how rice, a symbol of fertility among the matrilineal Minangkabau of West Sumatra, becomes a medium for passing on life force. In chapter five, Janowski describes how sharing a rice meal is central to the construction of kinship among the Kelabit of Borneo because it leads to the transmission of life force from older couples to descending generations. Similarly in chapter two, Rens Heringa describes the role of food in the seven months pregnancy ritual in Kerek, East Java, in which the exchange of male and female foods transmits the "flow of life". A comparable emphasis on the generative potential of food is found in chapter seven; here, Timo Kaartinen focuses on Banda Eli, a Muslim village in the Kei Islands of eastern Indonesia. The staple food in Banda Eli is not rice but local cassava cakes (embal) that are considered to be a symbolic concentration of life force.

The authors emphasise how food not only mediates relationships between the living, but is also a way the living communicate with the dead. According to Kari Telle in chapter six, the rice meal among the Sasak of Lombok plays a central role in transforming the dead into ancestors who bestow "blessings" on the living. Kaartinen describes the parallels between mortuary rituals and the way in which people remember absent relatives in the Kei Islands. Chapter ten by Stephen Sparkes investigates the role of ancestral food offerings, especially rice, in the kinship system and cosmology of the Isan in Northeast Thailand and emphasises the importance of reciprocity between the living and the ancestral spirits in these ceremonies. The particularity of ancestral food offerings is also explored in the introduction. Janowski argues that through ancestral food offerings, descending generations feed preceding ones, thus reversing the usual direction of feeding among the living, in which foodstuffs, and, in turn, life force are transmitted from ascending to descending generations.

Several contributors discuss the production and preparation of food and its...