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Ingestion and Food Technologies: Maintaining Differences Over the Long-Term in West, South and East Asia

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Ingestion and Food Technologies: Maintaining Differences Over the Long-Term in West, South and East Asia See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/304007715 Ingestion and Food Technologies: Maintaining differences over the long-term in West, South and East Asia Article · January 2011 CITATIONS READS 16 66 2 authors: Dorian Q Fuller Mike Rowlands University College London University College London 226 PUBLICATIONS 6,408 CITATIONS 24 PUBLICATIONS 308 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects: Reconstruction of Chinese early rice farmers' foodways by food residue chemical analyses and ethnographic research (JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Innovative Areas 2015-2020) View project Early Rice Project View project All content following this page was uploaded by Mike Rowlands on 31 January 2017. The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. 5. Ingestion and Food Technologies: Maintaining Differences over the long-term in West, South and East Asia Dorian Q. Fuller and Mike Rowlands Andrew Sherratt’s interpretation of a Bronze Age world-system emphasised flows of materials, ideas and people in the integration of large regional systems. In this paper the authors complement this stance and Andrew’s recognition of the social importance of food with a focus on long-term boundary maintenance and how these are maintained even with evidence of large-scale flows in other contexts through a focus on long-term continuities of food systems. Ritual and cosmological ideas, foodstuff selection and technologies of preparation and consumption (including pottery usage) indicate stable culinary or food zones over millennia despite the movement of food items: roasting/grinding technologies in western Eurasia (the Near East and Mediterranean); boiling/steaming of foods in eastern Eurasia (China and the Far East); with an alternative overlapping food world in South Asia. “Calories don’t cause people to do things; calories Introduction: substances, sacrifice and more allow them to do things they want to do for other than subsistence reasons” Andrew Sherratt (1995, 8) Food is a fundamental cross-cultural category of consumption combining biological need with socially charged symbolism. In all societies commensality, the sharing of food, is a way “Although masquerading as a neutral, descriptive of establishing closeness and refusal to do so is usually seen term, ‘subsistence’ is in fact heavily freighted with as a sign of distance or enmity (Bloch 2005, 45).Cultural intellectual baggage…. ‘mere subsistence’ implies anthropology and archaeology have long explored food in just enough to keep body and soul together: enough the ethnographic present or the distant past, but with rather to stay alive without transmitting messages about different emphases. Archaeologists have tended to discuss social superiority. The very employment of the term “subsistence,” and the means by which past human groups implies the constant danger of behaviour which it procured enough to eat, from foraging or food production. forbids. Such motives also underlie its more general As the late Andrew Sherratt (1999) emphasized, the standard usage: the whole concept is actively constructed in archaeological use of the term “subsistence” is problematic, opposition to an accurate depiction of everyday reality. since in more general usage it implies a bare minimum of It is, in short, a rhetorical rather than a scientific term: necessary sustenance, as in “subsistence-level” farmers, and a utopian representation of a world without ostentation tends to preclude much consideration of food as a source of and cupidity.” surpluses for social exchange, as through feasting or trading Andrew Sherratt (1999, 13) in valued foodstuffs. More recently, there has developed a focus on feasting as ritualised acts of commensality involving food sacrifice, conspicuous consumption and luxury foods in 38 Dorian Q. Fuller and Mike Rowlands marking differences within social hierarchies, i.e. commensal Asia respectively. In developing our understanding of a politics (e.g. Dietler 1996; Dietler and Hayden 2001; Bray bread-focused and roasting culinary system of west Eurasia, 2003; van der Veen 2003; Jennings et al. 2005). Such a we will point towards the overlaps and differences with focus still maintains a distinction of the feast from more adjoining south Asia and northern Africa. Work along these mundane acts of food consumption. This can be thought of lines has already been done by Haaland (2006; 2007) who as an explicit counterpart to habituated taste, in the sense has drawn contrasts between northeast African porridge and explicated by Bourdieu (1984, 173–193) as embodied class Near Eastern bread cuisines, but we will expand this over culture in which social position is indicated through self- larger Eurasian and north African geography and explore fulfilling preferences. relationships of food preparation regimes, food texture, and Anthropologists have instead, developed a discourse on systems of ritual and supernatural understanding. Roasting substances, with food as part of the ‘natural’ components and baking, for example, are strongly linked to notions of that make up bodies, like blood defined by Schneider as ‘a sacrifice in which smoke ‘feeds the gods’ (cf. Vernant 1989). fact of nature’ or those ingested, like liquids and food, or Roasting and bread based cuisines, associated with west excreted, like semen or saliva (Schneider 1980; Bloch 2005; Eurasia and northern south Asia, seem to correlate with Warnier 2007). An anthropological attention to how the body cosmologies invoking distant gods/spirits for whom sacrifice and its substances are understood has highlighted different is a means of propitiation. By contrast in east Eurasia, with cultural schema in terms of what is basically immutable, a focus on China, techniques of boiling, elaborated into what is mutable and what is partible (Strathern 1988). There steaming, were long fundamental to cuisine and linked with is frequently a rich set of symbolic beliefs surrounding most commensality and regimes of feeding ancestors by living culinary systems, linking these to conceptions of the body, descendants. Boiling, as recognized by Levi-Strauss (1978, kinship and society (e.g. Beardsworth and Keil 1997; Bell 482) is well-suited to representing commensality through a and Valentine 1997; de Boeck 1994; Lèvi-Strauss 1978). As cooking process that seals in substances. Such practices suit, has been often discussed by anthropologists bodily substances cosmologies in which good spirits and gods are meant to be (semen, breast-milk, blood etc.) may be conceived to attracted to reside close to the living lineage members. We combine in different ways with ‘natural’ substances to create will also explore the division within the rice eating world body differences, reproductive differences and contrasting between the sticky rice zone of eastern Asia, and the non- conceptions of sexuality (Strathern 1992; Battaglia 1995). sticky area of south Asia, which foregrounds a major culinary Cultural differences in the understanding of food and bodily frontier between east and west Eurasian food systems. The substances have been largely discussed in an ahistorical, combination of technological traditions engrained within ethnographic present, and we would like to combine cosmological frameworks may make for very powerful forces this approach with the more subsistence focused work of technological and subsistence conservatism. We argue that of archaeologists, by considering the long-term material there is a deep level of conservative tastes that link basic ideas practices of food preparation and consumption which can of feeding the body, i.e. the taking or ingesting of food, to be accessed by archaeology (Jones 2007). notions of ritual efficacy, of ‘feeding’ the invisible (ancestors/ Archaeology, history and ethnography together provide gods), and to long term patterns of culinary practices. access to long-term and apparently quite stable patterns in food preparation and cuisine. We will argue that there is a long-term additive process in the development of culinary systems, in which new foods are added to existing repertoires, Pottery versus grinding: pre-agricultural or new cooking techniques are adopted as elaborations, but functional alternatives essential regional traditions are maintained. These regional Archaeologists have long focused on the origins of food technologies of food, culinary systems, may themselves play production as a fundamental change in subsistence, what a role the in the selection of appropriate foodstuffs, acting as Childe (1936) called the “Neolithic Revolution”. As noted by templates to additions and changes in food. There are also Sherratt (1995) this assigned a priority to calorific values, in examples of cultural traditions of taste and preparation acting which the shift in obtaining food, through domestication of on the genetic changes of food plants to better fit with cultural plants/animals is given primacy over changes in settlement traditions of cuisine. Thus cultural systems of understanding pattern, social organization and ritual (for recent surveys and valuing food can be argued to have conditioned biological see Bellwood 2005; Barker 2006). While factors such as selection on certain species, just as much as it conditioned the ability to produce larger surpluses and feed more people technological evolution. have no doubt been important, we wish to highlight that We will focus
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