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Habits
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5. FOOD, IDENTITY, IDENTIFICATION
Jeremy MacClancy
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64 Jeremy MacClancy
Modes of Identification
Modes of identification are many and operate at many different levels. The
scheme I here present is only to be taken as illustrative or suggestive. It is
intended as a springboard for thought, not as a prescription etched in acid. In
the same vein, I should add that the particular modes catalogued below are not
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Food, Identity, Identification 65
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66 Jeremy MacClancy
lost, but which we can try to re-create through cooking. The world
they have lost, however, is almost always rural, green and harmon-
ious; there are no ugly towns, dirty chimney stacks or working-class
discontent in the visions they perpetuate. Cookbooks may also appeal
to the aspirations of their readers, feeding their fantasies about the
identities they wish to achieve rather than lending substance to the
identities they already possess. Thus contemporary cookbooks which
focus on the folkloric, the nostalgic, or the aspirational (as so many
do) may tell us less about culinary conditions than about collective
imaginations, present-day values, and popular dreams, hopes and
aims. They have to be seen not as descriptive documents but as pre-
scriptive ones, giving us an inkling of the culinary worlds their authors
would like to see.
It is important here to remember that the claims to existence of any
contemporary nation are partly legitimated by its self-vaunted pos-
session of a prestigious culture, and that an ideologically significant
part of a culture may well be its distinctive cuisine. For these reasons,
the modern rise of nationalism and regionalism has boosted the pro-
duction of cookbooks. Indeed in some cases it may well be the nation-
alists or regionalists themselves who are funding the publication of
these books. It is common for claims to be made about the great age
of much local cuisine. For, as Zubaida (2000: 41) argues, This sup-
posed historical antiquity and continuity are cited as, somehow, a
confirmation of the authenticity and superiority of the present-day
national cuisine. History, then, becomes the measure of national
virtue, including food. According to this line, eating in a local manner
is to consume history, to uphold virtue.
When looking at a Basque cookbook for the first time, the questions
I usually ask myself are: Who wrote this? For whom? When? Where?
What position did the author hold? What local contexts can this book
be fitted into? Who are the publishers? Who funded this book? What
might the author have gained from producing it? What interests,
beyond the immediately individual, was he or she seeking to pro-
mote? How successful was the book? What image of the Basqueland,
of local society, and of local cooking is the author trying to portray?
What are the proportions between the different kinds of dishes (meat,
fish, vegetable, sweet, etc.)? Are significant proportions of the dishes
from distinct sub-zones of the area in question? In other words, these
books are not simply to be broached, but to be interrogated.
(b) Novels, especially bad novels: the less artistry the local author dis-
plays the better, for then all the more likely he or she is to tell us
about local life in a relatively unmediated, unpolished manner. From
reading local novels, I have been able to learn about, for example,
the social importance granted to cultivating a fine palate, the role of
food in romance, and the centrality of feasting.
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Food, Identity, Identification 67
(c) Memoirs: another neglected source of data, most likely because the
trawl, on occasion, can be long and the catch relatively meagre.
However in my Basque case, the sorts of information I have been able
to glean from examples of this genre include accounts of recently
defunct rules of behaviour and forms of interaction, both formal and
informal, as well as eulogies to the local diet and styles of cooking.
As in other domains of activity, what is more important here is often
the mode of praise rather than its content.
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68 Jeremy MacClancy
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Food, Identity, Identification 69
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70 Jeremy MacClancy
Figure 5.1 Food as part of local identity: the weekly dinner of an age-set, in
their clubhouse, in a Navarran village
be lost so easily. So they raised some of the money to have the task carried out
professionally, and did what remained themselves.
Traditional festivities included the weekly dinners of some age-sets within
the village. One form of village classification is the division of everyone into
age-sets, each covering about a five-year period. If the members of an age-set
are active and enthusiastic, they buy a small house or storage building, and
convert it into their own premises. Its main purpose is for the holding of
dinners every Saturday night and every night during the week-long annual
fiestas of the village. A different pair of members prepares the meal each time,
and clears up afterwards. If successful, these meals can be lengthy, lively and
loud, with well-charged members singing, debating, and not moving onto the
bars of the village until one or two in the morning.
At both meals with my landlords and with the age-set I was attached to, it
was important to note: what was being eaten, in what terms was it being
assessed, and how was it judged? Information collected in this way may pro-
vide insights into the way food is locally valued, while the degree of criticism,
its fineness, and how publicly it may be stated are all indicators of how con-
cerned locals are about the quality of what they eat. They are also indicators
of the extent to which locals recognise a refined palate and the ability to talk
about it as a hallmark of savoir-faire, as a necessary skill for those who wish to
be regarded even minimally civilised, or as a sure sign of snobbery. For what
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Food, Identity, Identification 71
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72 Jeremy MacClancy
in this ongoing discussion become ever more refined, and the intersubjectivity
they are creating that much more extensive and subtle. The result, according
to Clifford, is not a definitive ethnography but a book which should be assessed
as the complicit manufacture by the parties involved of a historically con-
tingent intercultural text. On this reading, anthropologists do not simply dis-
cover what is going on in the village but painstakingly help put together a
collection of partial truths.
Cliffords approach is itself all too obviously partial. It forgets the other
conversations an ethnographer participates in before production of his or her
ethnography: dialogues with colleagues and other academics, all of which help
in the formulation of the partial truths. But Cliffords key point should still
be well taken. Anthropologists do not deal in hard-edge facts which, like tins
on a supermarket shelf, can be pulled down by a customer and rearranged as
suits. The statements ethnographers fabricate are much more grounded, a fact
they have to stress to some of their readers, who might otherwise be easily
mislead.
A Final Point
Anthropologists cannot prescribe exactly which food-related dimensions pro-
moters of local identity may wish to focus on. They may stress particular foods,
combinations of foods, particular prohibitions, styles of cooking, particular
tastes or textures, structures and timing of meals, size of portions, table
manners, and so on. It is up to the fieldworker to find out exactly which are
being used to drive the vehicle of identity.
References
Barth, F. (1969) Introduction. In Barth, F. (ed.) Ethnic Groups and Boundaries:
The social organization of culture difference, Universitetsforlaget, Oslo: 938.
Boissevain, J. (ed.) (1992) Revitalizing European Rituals, Routledge, London.
Clifford, J. (1980) Fieldwork, Reciprocity, and the Making of Ethnographic Texts,
Man 15: 518532.
Eriksen, T.H. (1993) Ethnicity and Nationalism: Anthropological perspectives, Pluto,
London.
Fragner, B. (2000) Social Reality and Culinary Fiction: the perspective of cookbooks
from Iran and Central Asia. In Zubaida, S. and Tapper, R (eds.) A Taste of Thyme:
Culinary cultures of the Middle East, Taurus, London: 6371.
Hobsbawm, E., and Ranger, T. (eds.) (1983) The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge.
MacClancy, J.V. (1996) Sport, Identity and Ethnicity. In MacClancy, J.V. (ed.) Sport,
Identity and Ethnicity, Berg, Oxford: 120.
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Food, Identity, Identification 73
MacClancy, J.V. (1997) Anthropology, Art and Contest. In MacClancy, J.V. (ed.)
Contesting Art. Art, Politics and Identity in the Modern World, Berg, Oxford:
126.
MacClancy, J.V. (n.d.) Cultures of Nationalism: a Basque example. Forthcoming.
Zubaida, S. (2000) National, Communal and Global Dimensions in Middle Eastern
Food Cultures. In Zubaida, S. and Tapper, R. (eds.) A Taste of Thyme: Culinary
cultures of the Middle East, Taurus, London: 3345.
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