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Anthropology is Everywhere

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Food is a complicated theme, to say the least (note to self – when isn’t it, and what isn’t? 😉 ). Many of us think very little about food apart from what it means to us on a daily basis. Anthropology, however, thinks about food all the time, because food creates a large part of how we identify ourselves within even the most fluid cultures, as well as within our personal interactions, social, cultural and religious context and in all that stems from them. There are probably three key texts in anthropology that everyone should at least vaguely know about – Mary Douglas’ study on behaviour and food prohibitions (Purity and danger), Audrey Richards’ extensive research of food among the Bemba (Land, Labour and Diet in Northern Rhodesia: an economic study of the Bemba tribe) and my personal favourite, Deborah Lupton’s “Food, the body and the self”. (Not to rave about this or anything, but I read that book in the first month of my first year of studies, and suffice to say that it has stuck with me and it is still useful in my own work. That is some good anthropology! 🙂 ). Apart from these texts, which each deal with their own approach to food and society, and can be interesting for both the professional reader and a layman (a little suggestion – many of these books are expensive, either go to a library or hunt down a used copy if you intend to read them!), there are really two main approaches to study of food that you should know and those are what I want to discuss today.

The first approach is ethnographic; in other words, we look at what people do, what they eat and how, and what this means to them. This is possibly the most prevalent approach in anthropology, and while it’s highly informative in some ways, it falls foul of generalisations and guesswork very often. The second approach, and that is an approach I use within all my work (and one that Lupton and to a certain extent Douglas touch possibly the most) is to consider human psychology, how it shapes the environment and how that influences it back in a true chicken and egg approach. Anthropology cannot be anything without understanding of psychology; at the same time, psychology cannot function well without taking into account anthropological data. And food is no exception. To be successful in ascertaining anything, we must therefore mix the ethnographic approach with the psychological approach, and both be subject to the good old forensic approach – ABC (accept nothing, believe no one, check everything) and 6Ws (Who, Why, What, Where, How, When).

Food is, as we have said, a lot more than just a question of what we eat. It is how we eat, the mode of preparation, restrictions (traditionalist, personal, social, religious, familial…), what is available, what is its nutritional value, how it features in our own or other health plans, how we share or do not share it and hundreds of other topics. Some foods come up only under specific circumstances, like specific festivals; my favourite examples of that are the Mooncakes (normally made for the Chinese Moon festival which is also a Lovers’ festival; as I met my partner then, I have, you could say, a special place in my heart for them 🙂 ) and Yule log, a type of cake that is found both in France and in the UK (to my knowledge; I would not be surprised if it is eaten elsewhere though) and can be amazingly ingeniously decorated. Some foods are eaten in a different way during a course of specific events than normally – rice, for instance, is speared rather than picked up with chopsticks at funerals in Japan (https://everythingchopsticks.com/Chopsticks-University/The-Definitive-Guide-to-Chopsticks-Etiquette-Around-the-World). Some foods have an associated “goodness” or “badness” or national or traditional belonging (bread; exotic food – exotic according to the person in question!-, fast food; nshima, taro, rice, haggis…). Foods are debated for their nutritional value, which does not always fit with health value; superstitions are attached to foods that illustrate just how much we have incorporated a certain type of control over them through time, especially in rigid societies, where acceptability or unacceptability hits the plate as well as everything else.

All this helps us understand how we behave in specific contexts. A behaviour concerning food can be informative about other behaviour. Relations between acceptance and restriction show us how rigid or otherwise the person, the family, the society, and what we can expect. This is a still extant problem within psychology and psychiatry… that very often, a disorder is not considered due to imposition of social or religious reasons, which leaves the cases unexplored and the victims to suffer; and many of those cases include direct abuse by a third person or persons involved.

When it comes to food, I have a lot of personal interest in preparation. It has come to my attention that often, how something is prepared matters a lot more than the result; I have spoken with people who firmly believed that unless something was prepared in the exact manner expected (OCD, anyone?), the food would not be safe to eat, taste the same, or even cook properly. This is something that is prevalent even in the West, often among older generations, in rigid environments (such as Eastern Europe or familial contexts) and especially more often among the lower classes, where the leaning to rigidity is greater. This is a wonderful example of the duality of food as a necessity and yet something many do not trust fully…unless it is prepared and dealt with in a socially acceptable manner. Aura of factuality features a lot here – the disbelief that something can possibly happen outside of the presupposed, proscribed way. And it can be insurmountable, even with repeated physical demonstration of the opposite.

To end this post, I have a little anecdote to share. It’s a joke I heard while on terrain, and it illustrates this matter so perfectly (as well as general aura of factuality and how psychology and rigid cultures work) that I have since used it in many professional works. It goes like this.
A young girl is learning how to cook for the first time. She decides to make hot dogs, but isn’t sure how. So she goes to her mother. ,,How do I make hot dogs?”she asks. ,,Boil water in a pot; then cut off the ends of the sausages and put them in to cook,” mother answers. The girl finds this odd, so she asks: ,,Why do I have to cut off the ends?” ,,Because that is how it is done,” mother says. ,,Don’t ask questions.”
The girl decides for a second opinion. ,,Grandmother,” she says, ,,how do I make hot dogs?” ,,Boil water in a pot; then cut off the ends of the sausages and put them in to cook,” grandmother answers. ,,But why?” asks the child. ,,Because that is how it is done,” grandmother says. ,,Don’t ask questions.”
Perplexed beyond reason, the little girl runs to her great-grandmother. ,,Great-grandmother,” she says, ,,I want to cook hot dogs. Why do I have cut off the ends before I put them in the boiling water?”
And the great-grandmother sighs and says: ,,Haven’t you guys bought a bigger pot yet?!”

Food for thought, we could say. 😉 🙂