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65 Chapter 3 TheHabitusofCookingPracticesatNeolithicÇatalhöyük WhatWasthePlaceoftheCook? ChristineA.Hastorf University of California Berkeley Perhaps more than any other human activity, the act of eating creates the person as well as the community. Food is the ultimate social glue. Many ethnographers who have ventured forth to study kinship, economics, politics, gender relations, ritual, or trade have found that their informants channel their discussions to their foodways and its central place in their lives (Descola 1994; Richards 1939; Hugh-Jones 1979; Kahn 1986; March 1987; Meigs 1984; Weismantel 1988). Any newspaper today demonstrates how important food is in our lives too, with sections full of recipes, discussions of food and health, and even the economics of pork belly futures. The memory of past events and people overwhelms us when we have contact with a taste or a smell that harkens back to our past (Proust 1934; Sutton 2001). Food preparation or presentation can literally change the chemistry in our bodies as well as alter our emotional states. How powerful is that? And on the home front, our daily practice is punctuated by meals, both casual and formal; it’s relentless. This dance through the weeks, months, and years links us to our selves and our families as it marks our place in the greater world. The same is true for the conductor, the cook. Cooks have their orchestra of ingredients, flavors, supplies, and timing to work with, as they have meals ready on a regular 66 ChristineA.Hastorf basis. It is through this reenactment that we create ourselves through this most important daily practice. Since food is at the heart of all larger cultural structures, it is a potent key to a better understanding of people outside of our own experience . While we study food on the very small scale, this angle allows us a new level of sensitivity that can be transmitted to larger understandings. The study of foodways can help archaeologists recover the humanity of the past through the study of this daily, usually enjoyable act that garners meaning with each bite. Ultimately it is the preparers that make the meal, that bring the food to the table. And so in this volume and this paper we focus on the cook and food preparation to see what we can learn about the past through this powerful door. Through the study of these actions, these daily practices, procurement, cooking, and eating, we get closer to past peoples and the world they lived in. Suchactsaredriveninpartbythepoliticaleconomiesoftheday.Societieshave collapsed from famine, wars have been fought over water to grow crops. The people of Ireland are associated and even identified with the potato, an Andean domesticate brought to England during the age of discovery (Messer 1997). The potato is even called the Irish potato by many, due to its adoption, driven by a series of wars, increasingurbanization,anditshighyields.Butitwasthemassivefaminethatreally linked the Irish people with this crop. After the potato blight (fungus Phytophthora infestans) hit the Irish crop in 1845 and 1846, many residents were forced to immigrate or die of starvation. This occurred because there was only one potato variety (Solanum tuberosum) that was grown there, with little genetic variability to combat this fungus (Hawkes 1990). Such narrow genetic stock brought over to Europe made the crop vulnerable to disease. It took only three hundred years for this to happen. Of course, this massive famine was aided by the political relations with the English, who produced wheat in Ireland at the time that was exported for their consumption. Prime Minister Tony Blair apologized for this catastrophe in 2004. Such political food agendas are happening in Africa as I write this. Women in Darfur struggle daily to get wood to cook their meals for their families; for them it is a full-time job just to get hot food into a bowl. This is how we know their plight is bad. No one can say that mealtime is not political and economic. How the raw stuff of procured ingredients becomes the flavorful dish is laden with cultural implications. Cuisines have symbolic importance. Mary Douglas (1966, 1970, 1984) has written extensively and cogently about food and its powerful symbolic place within society. Foods carry messages about the patterns of social relations, social events, hierarchy, inclusion, exclusion, boundaries , and transactions across boundaries (Douglas 1971:61). The boundaries of these intimate and social activities construct the personhood of many people. Gil Stein (this volume) aptly unravels how local women who married into a traders enclave still cooked in...

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