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

1. Digesting the Feast—Good to Eat, Good to Drink, Good to Think: An Introduction

1 DIGESTING THE EAST: GO D TO EAT, GOOD TO DRIN GOOD TO THINK AN INTRODUCTION Michael Dietler and Brian Hayden With apologies to Levi-Strauss for yet another usurping of his famous dictum, a central argument of this volume is surely that feasts arc "good to think." Indeed, these chapters collectively indicate the appropriateness of this statemenl in two crucial senses. In the first place, they convincingly demonstrate that thinking about feasts can, and should. provide an important point of departure for understanding culture and social life in both past and present societies. In particular. the time is long overdue for feasts to be taken seriously by archaeologists as a significant -perhaps a central-social practice. Secondly. however, these chapters also show chat transforming feasts from something considered as epiphenomenal trivia worthy of little more than bemused speculation into a subject of recognized importance and analytical utility is by no means a straightforward proposi- MIchael DIetler and Brzan Hayden tion. We need to think seriously and critically about what feasts are, how they operate , and how we can detect and interpret them. Otherwise, they risk becoming one more ill-digested archaeological interpretive fad. One of the main stimuli for undertaking this book, and for convening the symposium that generated it, was that both of the editors came to the conclusion over a decade ago that feasts are an extremely significant aspect of social life on a worldwide scale, and that understanding them is crucial for apprehending and comprehending many social and cuIrural processes in ancient societies. However, we arrived at this mutual conclusion by quite different routes and from very different theoretical dispositions. As will be evident from our respective chapters and prior publications on the subject, Hayden's perspective (see Chapter 2) is firmly grounded in a culturalecology orientation. Furthermore, he was originally led to explore this line of research largely by his interest in the evolutionary implications of feasting in the transformation of sociopolitical structures in hunter-gatherer societies of the Pacific Northwest and Paleolithic Europe. Dietler's perspective (see Chapter 3), on the other hand, grew out of the domain of social theory often referred to by the ecologically inclined as "culturalist"-that is, a perspective that takes culture seriously as a historical agent as well as a historical product-although, because of its determinist implications, this label is one that few scholars would actually apply to themselves. Hence, Dietler's perspective actually has a strong social orientation . with roots in practice theory and political economy (in a nutshelL there is a central concern with the intricate relationship between culture and power). Moreover. he was induced to investigate feasting as a result of archaeological and ethnographic research among agrarian societies in Europe and Africa. This very fact of arriving at a conjuncture of interest and understanding from such strikingly different directions strengthened oLir convictions that, despite our continuing dialogue of disagreement over a number of issues (see below. and Chapters 2 and 3), we had stumbled upon something of genuine and general significance. One of the more disconcerting conclusions that we also agreed upon. however . was that feasting was both severely undertheorized in the existing literature and lacked systematic empirical documentation of a kind that would be useful for archaeological interpretation. This is not to claim that feasting has been completely ignored in the earlier archaeological and anthropological literature. or that significant insights have not been forthcoming (e.g.. see Friedman 1984: Friedman and Rowlands 1978). However, these earlier works generally included analyses of fcasts as peripheral observations: they did not generate a systematic theoretical exploration of the subject and they failed to engender a sustained archaeological pursuit of their implications. Hence, we sought to convene a group DIGESTING THE FEAST of other scholars who have recently begun to pursue similar issues in a wide variety of both ethnographic and archaeological contexts in order to forge a better, if still provisional, understanding of the nature of the feast as a social institution and cultural practice. As the chapters in this volume attest, these scholars also exhibit a healthy diversity of theoretical orientations and ideas about how to understand feasts. Consequently. this brief introductory essay is less an attempt to force these chapters into a strained synthetic summary than it is a selective highlighting of a few key themes that indicate the current state of research and suggest future directions. CATEGORIES AND DEFINITIONS Perhaps the...