Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Cultural anthropologists are expressly interested in the ways that food, as Barthes (or more
accurately his translator) puts it, “signalizes” other behaviors. Barthes, of course, was not
himself an anthropologist, but his semiology, along with other linguistic and literary theo-
ries of meaning, had an enduring impact on anthropological analyses from the 1960s. We
study food's “messages,” the affects it carries, the ways its uses may organize many other
aspects of human existence within diverse cultural worlds.2 Such messages and affects are
manifold; they may be obvious or subtle, banal or extraordinary, domestic or cosmologi-
cal. Deeply linked to food in any given setting are myriad elements of behavior and emo-
tion that would not necessarily have anything to do with caloric intake. Food meanings and
metaphors can be bland as vanilla pudding or rich, mysterious, and complex as a Mexican
mole. They may reach no deeper than pocketbooks, or they may suffuse hearts and souls.
The anthropology of food looks at all the ways food is more than food and its interpretative
strategies are not limited to semiotics, but range through various notions of symbolism and
representation; metaphor and synecdoche. Counihan (1999) writes about “bread as world”
in Sardinia and tortillas “like life” in the San Luis Valley of Colorado (2009). Ohniko-Tierney
addresses “rice as self ” in Japan (1993). Food is cosmos and divinity. Food is identity, mem-
ory, and locality. Food is emotion, relationships, and sex, and is, needless to say, deeply inter-
twined with kinship ideals and gender roles. Food is gift, offering, rank, commerce, and
usury. Food is agency and power.3 Because there are very few humans who do not engage
with food every day of their lives, there is simply no limit to contexts in which we can regard
food as a substance on which, with which, and through which humans exist, whether its uses
are festive or everyday, sacred or profane, benign or cruel. In many cultures, the dead do not
cease to demand and consume food. Deliberate abstinence from food is a well-refined tech-
nology of power that has been deployed through history both to spiritual and political ends.
Textbooks on the anthropology of food may begin, as does Anderson's
Everyone Eats
(2005), with facts about nutrition, but they rapidly move on to a panoply of food-related
topics including pleasure, medicine, religion and ethnicity. Others, such as the retrospec-
tive reader
Food and Culture
(Counihan and Van Esterik 1997), plunge head first into the
vastness of food meanings, and then turn to organize these into collective aspects of food
and eating, such as commensality, ethnicity and more individual aspects such as body
image and fasting practices. Interestingly, in spite of their very different organizational
modes, both these books, published in 2005 and 1997, respectively, conclude by focusing
on hunger as a manifestation and consequence of inequities both national and global.
By making the link between food, culture, and endemic world hunger, such anthro-
pological approaches lead readers to face what most residents of relatively prosperous
nations know but normally refuse to contemplate on a regular basis: that some people
are starving while others have more food than they need and even more than is good
for their health. Still more disturbing is that there are structural reasons for this inequity
that might be remedied if it were possible to implement a transnational food morality.
Folk culture in many societies supports such morality, as the discussion of Indian food
values, which follows, will exemplify. Market forces do not.4
Notoriously dependent on the kindness of strangers, anthropologists whose meth-
odologies rely on intimacy and participation normally learn to eat as do the people with
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