Adventures in Eating: Anthropological Experiences in Dining from Around the World

Epilogue: Edibles and Ethnic Boundaries, Globalization and Guinea Pigs

277 After seeing a title like Adventures in Eating, many casual browsers might imagine this book to be part of the growing genre of media aimed at shocking and disgusting the U.S. public. Television shows depict “ordinary” people engaging in mock battles, testing their mettle in unfamiliar settings, and ingesting revolting objects in a quest to titillate, horrify, and amuse viewers. Many shows that are billed as travel adventures actually focus on the weird and kinky behaviors and customs of the cultures they examine. In all of these cases they objectify the people they depict and trivialize the cultures they examine—precisely the opposite of what anthropologists seek to do, and precisely opposite the focus of this book. As the core principle of our discipline, anthropologists embrace the concept of cultural relativism; our goal is to understand another culture on its own terms rather than to impose our judgments of normalcy on others. While we do not always achieve this ideal, it has been the core goal of our field for more than 100 years, coming from the founding father of American anthropology, Franz Boas. Boas’s challenge to us was to be systematic in our examinations of other cultures, to meticulously document cultural traits and history, and to find grounds of commonality among different cultural groups. Most of the E p i l o g u e Miriam S. Chaiken Edibles and Ethnic Boundaries, Globalization and Guinea Pigs Miriam S. Chaiken 278 articles in this book have that quest for cross-cultural understanding as the central theme. Reminick, Palka, Zycherman, and Chaiken all reflect on the ways shared meals reveal and reinforce social relations and how offers of hospitality to the “outsider” anthropologist signal a measure of acceptance by the members of the communities we study. In the latter two cases, these offers raise challenges to our anthropological goal of cultural relativism, as our own enculturated values leave us hard-pressed to entirely surrender the food rules that can be both ingrained and purposeful, such as Zycherman’s struggle to retain her kosher practices. Our discussions of the uses of foods that are unfamiliar, and even challenging to us, show the difficulty of maintaining our cultural relativism in novel settings. Food has always had power beyond being a mere source of sustenance ; it has enormous symbolic value in every society. The choices of what is deemed edible obviously vary from culture to culture, and more importantly, who is allowed to eat together has even greater significance. We see the importance of this when the “rules” of dining commensality are challenged, such as when the brave young African American students quietly took their seats at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in the segregated South of Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960. We see the importance of these boundaries when Hindus of different castes, Muslims, and Christians defied conventions and demeaning ideas of ritual pollution and had communal “eat-ins” in Kerala, India, to rebel against the caste system and hierarchy (Franke and Chasin 1994). Food and eating have often been contested terrain as cultures clash, define themselves, and erect the boundaries that define in- and out-group identities (see Barth 1969 for the classic discussion of this issue). Conversely, the choice to share in another’s culinary traditions marks an erosion of the us-them dichotomy, as with Rachel Black’s invitation to share the Italian family’s dinner, the first sign of her acceptance as a member of the family. Many of the chapters in this book deal specifically with the anthropologists ’ quests to overcome their naturally and culturally ingrained food preferences and prejudices as they tried to fit in among the communities they study. Learning a new language, trying to navigate the subtleties of customs, and knowing one’s proper place are often challenges that anthropologists face; but the challenges of what we face on our plates or in our bowls can be even more significant. Some of our tales are deadly serious and others are more lighthearted , but they all share insights into how authors confronted their own biases and also the ways in which our eating practices were perceived by the people we study. In a number of chapters in this volume, the struggles that the authors report reflect the critical concept of liminality, as they examine items on the threshold between two bounded, culturally defined categories. This concept Edibles and Ethnic Boundaries, Globalization...