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Continuity and Adaptation in Arab American Foodways William G. Lockwood and Yvonne R. Lockwood THE PROCESS BY which immigrants become ethnic is long, gradual, and very complex. One can think of this process as ethnogenesis, or the creation of a new social group. Along with the development of a new ethnic group is a parallel development of a new subculture that both symbolizes the group's uniqueness to its members and marks off its social boundaries. The new subculture is created in the American context, altered to a greater or lesser degree from what was known in the homeland. Lebanese Americans are not the same as Lebanese in Lebanon, and Lebanese American culture is different from the culture(s) found in Lebanon. Neither do Lebanese Americans belong to a culture somewhere between American and Lebanese cultures, as might be surmised from the overly simple models of acculturation that have so far dominated thinking on the subject. Ethnicity exists only in specific contexts where one sort of people (Us) is brought into regular and intimate contact with people of other sorts (Them) (Barth 1969). In what follows, we are concerned with the cultural expressions that grow out of such contact, especially with regard to Arab American food and foodways and how these came to be the way they are. The process by which immigrants become ethnic begins as soon as they board the boats and planes that carry them to the New World. Selectiveprocesses are already atwork. No group of emigrants from any country represent a cross section of that country's population . They are always drawn from some regions more than others, some social strata more than others, and some communities more than others. Since each of these groups possesses a recognizable subculture (including distinctive foods and foodways), it is logical that immigrant communities cannot replicate exactly their old national culture in the New World. 515 Ethnic Futures Out of immigrant culture develops an ethnic culture that differs from it in significant ways. There are several primary sources on which this developing subculture draws. The first is the culture of the homeland. One aspect of the process is an amalgamation of the local, regional, and class-related subcultures that are represented in the immigrant community. A second source in the creation of an ethnic culture is the culture of mainstream America, such as it is experienced by immigrants and ethnics. The third source—too often overlooked— are the cultures of other immigrant and ethnic groups encountered in America. Most often, immigrants settle in neighborhoods and work in occupations associated with earlier immigrant groups. Yemeni immigrants in Detroit, for example, moved into houses vacated by Poles, Romanians, and Lebanese who were ready to move uptown or to the suburbs. An immigrant worker's foreman at the auto plant is likely to have been hired from a previous wave of immigrants. The creation of ethnic culture from these various sources takes place within the particular constraints of minority life: the homesickness, the prejudice, the sense of being different, the urge to assimilate or to resist assimilation, the need to recreate the Old World in the New or reject all possible reminders of the life that was. All shape the specific form taken by the new culture. Many anthropologists and folklorists refer to this cultural process as "creolization" (Abrahams 1980, 37677 ) after the term for a similar linguistic process. One can observe creolization in any aspect of ethnic culture, but it is particularly significant in food and foodways.1 There are numerous reasons for this. First, cooking and eating are expressive behavior, relatively easy to observe, and heavily laden with symbolic meaning. Because cuisine is especially responsive to new environments , where some ingredients are unavailable, and because new social settings bring new ways of eating and cooking, foodways are especially quick to adapt and change. At the same time, however, perhaps no aspect of culture is so resistant to change, so tenaciously held. Generations after the loss of their mother tongue, ethnic Americans are still likely to be cooking and eating some version of the family's "mother cuisine." In this essay we argue that in the creolization of Arab food and foodways (and quite possibly other aspects of culture) there are clear distinctions between the public, or commercial, and the private, or familial, spheres of behavior. For non-Arabs, it is invariably the public sphere that shapes the conceptualization of Arab American cuisine. 516 [3.145.23.123] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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