Feasts: Archaeological and Ethnographic Pespectives on Food, Politics, and Power

3. Theorizing the Feast: Rituals Of Consumption, Commensal Politics, and Power in African Contexts

THEORIZING HE AST RITUALS OF CONSUMPTION, COMMENSAL POLITICS, AND POWER IN AFRICAN CONTEXTS Michael Dietler "Feast" is an analytical rubric used to describe forms of ritual activity that involve the communal consumption of food and drink. Rituals of this kind play many important social. economic, and political roles in the lives of peoples around the world. As the chapters in this volume attest. recognition of this fact has been growing rapidly among archaeologists recently, along with the fertile insights that feasts may ofter in understanding social relations and processes in ancient societies . I would suggest that one of the reasons that a focus on feasting is, in fact, crucial to archaeology is that it constitutes part of a central domain of social action that has been largely absent from archaeological analysis to date, much to our detriment. Discussions of the transformation of political systems, for exam· pIe, have tended rather crudely to link broad evolutionary processes to general 65 Mtchael Dterler structural typologies without considering the intervening kinds of social practices by which people actually negotiate relationships. pursue economic and political goals, compete for power. and reproduce and contest ideological representations of social order and authority. Hence, there has been a general failure to deal effectively with issues of agency and to understand the ways in whieh practice transforms structure. In my view, it is essential for archaeologists to come to grips with the arenas of social action in which. and the sets of practices by which. the micropolitics of daily life are played out. This is the only way we will move beyond mechanistic typological reductionism in understanding historical transformations of various relations of power and in addressing such perennial issues as the development of social stratification and political centralization. For example. it is undoubtedly important to nuance our understanding of complex political structures with taxonomic distinctions. such as that between hierarchy and heterarchy raised by Crumley ([987); but it is equally important to attempt to understand the practices by which individuals create, maintain, and contest positions of power and authority within systems structured in these ways and, in the pursuit of their conDieting interests. transform the structures of the systems themselves. Put in simpler terms, we need to think seriously and realistically about political life as it is lived and experienced if we are to fill our analytical categories with meaningful content and advance beyond mechanistic structural correlations, vague pronouncements about overdetermined social processes, and sweeping evolutionist teleologies. HASTS, POL AND ARC EOlOGY There has been much written recently about the need to develop a practiceoriented approach in archaeology, but rather few coherent suggestions or effective demonstrations of how this can be accomplished. This is one of the principal attractions of a focus on feasts. Although as yet curiously underacknowledged, the "commensal politics" of feasting is a domain of political action that is both extremely important on a worldwide scale and potentially accessible to archaeological analysis (Dietler 1990, [996, 1999a; Hayden [990, [996). Indeed, I would contend both that feasts are inherently political and that they constitute a fundamental instrument and theater of political relations. In making this statement, let me explicitly emphasize that I manifestly do not mean to make the naive reductionist argument that feasts are only about power; nor do I mean that they are the only significant domain of political action. Far from it. But they are commonly an important arena for the representation and manipulation of political relations, and it behooves us to explore critically this dimension of such a widespread cultural institution. However, before we are able to fully exploit this promising av66 RITUALS OF CONSUMPTION, COMMENSAL POLITICS, AND POWER IN AFRICAN CONTEXTS enue of analysis, we need not only a greater range of empirical information about the diagnostic characteristics of feasts, but, most crucially, a more developed theoretical understanding of the nature of feasts as a distinctive kind of ritual practice, Ultimately, it is only through the latter that we will be able to comprehend and exploit the former, This is by no means a simple or straightforward proposition: it requires detailed, carefuL and subtle analytical exploration and argumentation, As noted above, I define feasts explicitly as a form of public ritual activity centered around the communal consumption of food and drink. Let me immediately anticipate a common misunderstanding of this definition by some archaeologists and make clear that identifying feasts as ritual activity does not mean that they...