Cajun Foodways

Preface

Prefacee This book is about the relationship between Cajun food and Cajun ethnic identity. It is not a cookbook, or a nutritional study, or a history of Cajuns or of their food. Rather, it is a description and interpretation of the symbolic aspects of Cajun ethnic foodways, based on field research in Louisiana and written from the perspective of folklore studies and cultural anthropology. Scholars in these fields use the term foodways to refer not only to food and cooking but to all food-related activities, concepts, and beliefs shared by a particular group of people. Many scholars who have studied foodways say that food has a symbolic or expressive dimension, that it conveys meaning. My purpose here is to explore how foodways convey meaning for a particular ethnic group, and to interpret the nature of the messages expressed regarding ethnic identity. Folklorists, by definition, have an interest in traditional culture—those customs, values, and ways of seeing the world that typify life in a particular community. Traditional culture is passed down from generation to generation, usually orally or by direct demonstration, and it is often rooted in a particular natural environment. Foreign to, and often at odds with, traditional or folk culture are mass media, mass marketing, and mass bureaucracies, all of which pressure people to conform to a modern, centralized, standardized lifestyle and worldview—a now global process which Alan Lomax describes as cultural "grey-out" (Lomax 1977). Ethnic and regional groups throughout the world face the double tug of the traditional and the modern. Why do people in the modern world, such as Cajuns and other ethnic groups, celebrate their traditions? Cajuns' attention to their own traditional foodways is more than merely nostalgia, or a clever marketing ploy to lure tourists and sell local products. The XI xii Preface symbolic power of Cajun food is deeply rooted in Cajuns' relationships with their natural environment and with other people, both Cajuns and non-Cajuns. The idea for this study of Cajun food and ethnic identity was inspired by Cajuns themselves. Before beginning field research in Louisiana, I made two preliminary trips to the state in 1978, to Bayou Lafourche in southeastern Louisiana and to the Lafayette area in the southwestern part of the state. As an anthropologist and folklorist specializing in the American South, I was curious about this group of southerners who deviate in important ways from the usual definitions of southerners. I was also curious about what was happening to traditional Cajun culture and identityin the midst of a then booming, oil-based economy; a large influx of nonCajun newcomers; and general participation in modern American life. These interests coalesced with the decision to focus on foodways and their relationship to contemporary Cajun identity. This decision grew out of observations I made during my preliminary field trips: the people I met spent a great deal of time cooking, eating, talking about food, and bragging about how special Cajun food is. This was the case seven years before Cajun food became the focus of intense national media attention in the mid-igSos. Some societies place more emphasis on their foodways than do others; they are more "preoccupied" with food and cooking than are other societies (Chang 1977:12). Cajuns claim to be unusually food-oriented, especially talented in food preparation, and distinctive in their ability to enjoy food. In addition, foods are frequently used as ethnic and regional emblems in Cajun Louisiana, a trend in keeping with the self-proclaimed concern with foods. I gathered much of the field data used in this study in the town of Breaux Bridge (St. Martin Parish) during a ten-month period in 197980 . I conducted research in the city of Lafayette (Lafayette Parish) for three months in late 1978 and continued to gather data there while I was living in nearby Breaux Bridge. From 1980 to 1983 I lived in Baton Rouge, where I collected data from the many Cajuns who are temporary or permanent residents of this border city to Acadiana. I also made numerous short field trips to communities throughout south Louisiana during my residency in the state. Preface xiii The city of Lafayette is located in the eastern portion of southwestern Louisiana's prairie country, about fifteen miles west of the edge of the Atchafalaya Basin swamp. It grew out of the consolidation of several primarily Acadian settlements on the Vermilion River. During antebellum days...