Rice: Global Networks and New Histories ed. by Francesca Bray et al. (review)

This volume adds to the growing body of scholarly and popular literature on individual foods. These biographies of an ingredient or dish typically trace its history and meaning, contextualize it within a cuisine or culture, or analyze its impact on global events and trends. Most of these publications illustrate how to "read" a food to understand the culture surrounding it, or vice versa, but only a few explore the processes of research and interpretation involved in this exploration. Grounded in the discipline of history, this multidisciplinary volume successfully introduces and problematizes current historiographical methods and theories along with debates about this important food, allowing readers to see into the workings of scholarly research and discussions.

Rice is a significant staple in many cuisines and has played a pivotal role in international trade and in the economies and societies of a number of nations. That it is worthy of study should be obvious to any educated reader. This collection affirms the importance of rice and introduces some of the issues surrounding it that rice historians grapple with. The book also introduces those issues to nonhistorians and nonspecialists in rice, neatly summarizing previous research, findings, and the debates around interpreting that scholarship. The articles are as international as rice itself, with both in-depth and comparative studies across the globe, including China, Japan, Indonesia, the Mekong Delta in southeast Asia, North America, particularly the Southeast and old Southwest, Brazil, and regions in west Africa.

The volume is well conceived and tightly edited, creating a cohesiveness not always found in collected volumes. The foreword and introduction detail the purpose of the project, which, according to Francesca Bray, one of the four coeditors of the volume, is more than an exploration of the history of rice from multiple perspectives, but is also meant to challenge standard ways of looking at history by being more collaborative and multidisciplinary and to illustrate the application of new approaches to historical research. New questions as well as the possibility of new interpretations arise from such collaborations. Most scholars of food would not need to be convinced of this need for multidisciplinarity; however, Bray is speaking to and for historians, who, she claims, need such a push. Her point that rice should be studied not only as a commodity but also as (in my words) a cultural artifact, symbol, nourishment, and aesthetic domain is an important one. This volume illustrates the worth of such expansion.

The book is organized around three sections with an introduction to each that describes and summarizes the primary debates and issues among historians. These introductions make the book particularly useful to scholars from other disciplines as well as to laypeople and students.

Part I, "Purity and Promiscuity," defines agriculture as humanity's attempt to control plants, a perspective reflecting the dualistic Western ethos of nature as an adversary to civilization. That ethos laid the foundation for industrialization, capitalism, modernity, and the treatment of food as primarily a commodity, a point addressed but not fully critiqued in the following chapters. The introduction nicely contextualizes the historical connections of rice to local societies as a narrative of humans attempting to control the "promiscuity" of rice to guarantee a semblance of mastery over its economic value as well as its nutritional worth. That narrative is then studied from a variety of approaches.

Chapter 2 critiques Clifford Geertz's influential theory of agricultural involution in Java, which posited that rice cultivation there resulted in a society of shared poverty and social elasticity, illustrating growth without development. Peter Boomgaard and Pieter Kroonenber suggest that, among other failures, Geertz overlooked the role of colonial powers in maintaining peace and improving transportation routes that then helped alleviate food shortages. David Biggs (chapter 5) takes a material-semiotic approach, applying actor-network theory to understanding the relationships between the four types of...