Adventures in Eating: Anthropological Experiences in Dining from Around the World

10: No Heads, No Feet, No Monkeys, No Dogs: The Evolution of Personal Food Taboos

181 Biographical sketch. Miriam Chaiken received her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology in 1983 from University of California at Santa Barbara. She has conducted research and worked in international development in Southeast Asia and east and southern Africa for more than twenty years and has a permanent position as a professor of anthropology and department head at New Mexico State University. She has served as the president of the Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition and is primarily interested in combating hunger and improving the conditions of health and nutrition for children in the developing world. Every fledgling anthropologist who is preparing to conduct first fieldwork is formally trained in research methods and informally prepared by the anecdotes shared by friends and mentors who have already successfully navigated the rite of passage that fieldwork represents in the discipline. My training was no different than this scenario. While a graduate student at University of California–Santa Barbara, I took research methods from the esteemed Paul Bohannan (then president of the American Anthropological Association) and C h a p t e r T e n Miriam S. Chaiken The Evolution of Personal Food Taboos No Heads, No Feet, No Monkeys, No Dogs Miriam S. Chaiken 182 classes on theory from other faculty. I delved into Southeast Asian cultures with Donald Brown (and previously as an undergraduate with James Eder at Arizona State). All of these professors set the bar high for us, challenging us to do excellent qualitative and quantitative fieldwork and to continue this important tradition of anthropologists. The informal transmission of knowledge needed during this apprenticeship was shared by the senior grad students, who had returned from “the field” full of wisdom and amusing tales of what not to do in conducting fieldwork, stories that remain vivid in my memory even now, decades later. Nowhere in all of this excellent preparation did anyone warn me about chicken-head soup. But I get ahead of myself. In the early 1980s I began to prepare for dissertation field research in Southeast Asia, and ultimately Palawan Island in the Philippines was the destination for my work. Palawan was an ideal choice because many of my interests could be pursued in this one locale. I had become interested in the process of spontaneous relocations of populations, which was happening all over Asia, paralleling a process of government-managed relocation schemes that were also moving people from areas of population density to frontier regions. I had originally envisioned exploring this issue in Indonesia, where the governmentplanned “transmigrations” were well established and well documented, but political difficulties in that nation at the time made this a problematic location. There was a smaller-scale process underway in the Philippines, and Palawan Island was the site of a notoriously badly managed relocation project near the town of Narra. Both of these conditions factored into my choice of Palawan for research. But the real reasons for the selection of this site boiled down to personal choices. My friend and undergraduate mentor, Jim Eder, had been working in Palawan for many years and generously provided contacts and networks to help establish plans for my working there as well. Secondly, my then boyfriend and now husband, Tom, went to Palawan in 1979 to scout for possible locations for both of our dissertation research projects. While my intent is not to expose my romances indiscreetly, my encounter with chicken-head soup was a direct result of my attachment to Tom. During the summer that Tom was in Palawan, he received a great deal of support from a family I will call the Flores, who had been great friends of Jim. This couple generously gave Tom advice and a place to stay while he scouted locations for our fieldwork. They knew that Tom was unmarried at the time, and although he referred to me and indicated I would be joining him when it came time for our full stint of fieldwork, Mrs. Flores apparently thought she had a better plan for his future. She had an unmarried friend from a prominent local family who she thought would make an ideal wife for Tom, and the chance to live in the United States was a welcome prospect for this woman. In spite of her valiant efforts, Mrs. Flores’s matchmaking efforts were unsuccess- No Heads, No Feet, No Monkeys, No Dogs 183 ful. When Tom returned to begin fieldwork in...