Studies of Food and Festivities in Three American Communities

FOOD IN THE SOCIAL ORDER Studies of Food and Festivities in Three American Communities MARY DOUGLAS, Editor Russell Sage Foundation New York The Russell Sage Foundation The Russell Sage Foundation, one of the oldest of America’s general purpose founda¬ tions, was established in 1907 by Mrs. Margaret Olivia Sage for “the improvement of social and living conditions in the United States.” The Foundation seeks to fulfill this mandate by fostering the development and dissemination of knowledge about the po¬ litical, social, and economic problems of America. It conducts research in the social sciences and public policy, and publishes books and pamplets that derive from this research. The Foundation provides support for individual scholars and collaborates with other granting agencies and academic institutions in studies of social problems. It maintains a professional staff of social scientists who engage in their own research as well as ad¬ vise on Foundation programs and projects. The Foundation also conducts a Visiting Scholar Program, under which established scholars working in areas of current inter¬ est to the Foundation join the staff for a year to consult and to continue their own research and writing. Finally, a Postdoctoral Fellowship Program enables promising young scholars to devote full time to their research while in residence for a year at the Foundation. The Board of Trustees is responsible for the general policies and oversight of the Foun¬ dation, while the immediate administrative direction of the program and staff is vested in the President, assisted by the officers and staff. The President bears final re¬ sponsibility for the decision to publish a manuscript as a Russell Sage Foundation book. In reaching a judgment on the competence, accuracy, and objectivity of each study, the President is advised by the staff and a panel of special readers. The conclusions and interpretations in Russell Sage Foundation publications are those of the authors and not of the Foundation, its Trustees, or its staff. Publication by the Foundation, therefore, does not imply endorsement of the contents of the study. It does signify that the manuscript has been reviewed by competent scholars in the field and that the Foundation finds it worthy of public consideration. BOARD OF TRUSTEES Herma Hill Kay, Chair Robert McCormick Adams Gardner Lindzey Earl F. Cheit Gary MacDougal Philip E. Converse James G. March Thomas C. Edwards Frederick Mosteller Renee Fox John S. Reed Carl Kaysen Marshall Robinson Patricia King Madelon Talley HONARY TRUSTEE David B. Truman Copyright © 1984 by Russell Sage Foundation. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechani¬ cal, photocopying, recording, of otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Number: 84-060262 Standard Book Number: 0-87154-210-2 10 987654321 This volume is dedicated to Audrey Richards and Margaret Mead for their pioneering work on food habits. - Contents 1 Standard Social Uses of Food: Introduction 1 MARY DOUGLAS 2 Metaphysical Aspects of an Oglala Food System 40 WILLIAM K. POWERS MARLA M.N. POWERS 3 Sociocultural Dynamics and Food Habits in a Southern Community 97 TONY LARRY WHITEHEAD 4 Meal Formats, Meal Cycles, and Menu Negotiation in the Maintenance of an Italian-American Community 143 JUDITH G. GOODE KAREN CURTIS JANET THEOPHANO 5 Measurement of Calendrical Information in Food-Taking Behavior 219 JONATHAN L. GROSS Index 279 Vll Contributors MARY DOUGLAS holds the Avalon Foundation chair in the humanities at Northwestern University, where she teaches in the departments of Anthropology and History and Literature of Religion. Several earlier essays on food behavior and food meanings can be found in a recent collection of her work, In the Active Voice. In 1984, she presented four lectures at the Ecole Practique des Hautes Etudes, University of Paris, on symbolism in modern society, with specific reference to the case of food. WILLIAM K. POWERS is professor and former chair of the Department of Anthropology at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. He received his B.A. from Brooklyn College, CUNY, in 1970; M.A. from Wesleyan University in 1971; and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1975. His writings include Oglala Religion (1977) and Yuwipi: Vision and Experience in Oglala Ritual (1982), both published by the University of Nebraska Press. MARLA N. POWERS is a visiting research associate at the Institute for Research on Women, Rutgers University. She received her B.A. from Brooklyn College, CUNY, in 1971, and her M.A. and IX « Contributors Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 1982. Her published works include “Menstruation and Reproduction: An Oglala Case,” which appeared in Signs, 1980. The Powerses have collaborated on research at Pine Ridge, South Dakota, for 27 years and are presently writing a number of books and articles on Oglala kinship and marriage, images of American Indian women, sexual symbolism in the Sun dance, Lakota foods, music, and dance. JUDITH GOODE is chairperson of the Department of Anthropology at Temple University. As an urban anthropologist, her interest in ethnicity brought her to the study of food systems. She now teaches and publishes in both urban and nutritional anthropology and has been active in organizing the Committee on Nutritional Anthropology. She is co-author of The Anthropology of the City (with Edwin Eames) as well as other books and articles. KAREN CURTIS received her M.S. in urban studies and Ph.D. in anthropology from Temple University. She is currently working at Temple on the Metropolitan Philadelphia Machine-Readable Records Survey Project. She has held several research positions in applied anthropology relating to education, manpower training, and economic development. Her major research has been related to Italian-Americans and nutritional anthropology. JANET THEOPHANO received her Ph.D. in folklore from the University of Pennsylvania. She was a founding editor of the Digest (an interdisciplinary newsletter on the study of food) developed at the University of Pennsylvania. She has worked on a child nutrition project for the New Jersey University of Medicine and Dentistry, She is currently a visiting professor of American studies at Pennsylvania State University, Middletown, Pennsylvania. x 1 Contributors TONY WHITEHEAD is an associate professor of social anthropology in the Department of Health Education, School of Public Health, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Dr. Whitehead received his M.S. in hygiene and Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Pittsburgh. His research interests include household structure and food habits, correlates of hypertension, gender constructs, men and family planning, family dynamics, African-American cultures and societies, cultural systems and health systems, and integrating qualitative and quantitative research methods for health program planning and evaluation. He has carried out research in the Commonwealth Caribbean, the rural South of the United States, urban America, and West Africa. JONATHAN GROSS is professor of computer science and vice-chairman of the Computer Science Department at Columbia University. He is also a member of the Department of Mathematics and the Department of Statistics. For his research accomplishments, which include forty papers, he has been awarded fellowships by IBM and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. He is the author of six books and serves on the editorial advisory boards of the Columbia University Press, Computers &■ Electronics magazine, and the Journal of Graph Theory. He is also a consultant to Bell Laboratories. xi Mary Douglas The Food Problem The idea is still widely held that the proper, the most direct, and in¬ deed the only true way to prevent famine and hunger is to increase food production. The emphasis on the physical shortage of food ma¬ terials has guided economic planning and dominated debates about global population and resources. It will be a difficult notion to correct, sustained as it is by convenient fictions and anchored in shared preju¬ dices. But gradually a reaction is being expressed. Food policy is not merely concerned with production, storage, and conveyance to the kitchens of the people. The worst horrors of famines could be dimin¬ ished and many famines even be averted if understanding the social, legal, and economic aspects of food problems was given priority. Amartya Sen (1981), in his study of the four great famines in Bangla¬ desh, Bengal, Sahel, and Ethiopia, demonstrates that famines cannot be explained by food shortages: famines are liable to occur even with good harvests and even in prosperity. People die of starvation in front of food-filled shops. The causes are complex shifts in the legal entitlements which determine individuals’ access to food. Adminis- 1 Food in the Social Order trators, like planners, are blinkered by their conviction that the causes lie in the physical supply of food. Unsuspecting of the ex¬ tremes to which people will go in order to protect their own stocks when food shortages are rumored, they compound their initial mis¬ understanding with prolonged mishandling. There is extraordinarily little to guide them about the social uses of food. The dominant para¬ digm treats the human problem in the same terms as getting fodder into cattle troughs. This volume seeks to present an expanded and humanist approach to food. Only observe how little is known about access to foods at the domestic level, about the cultural influences training tastes, or about the micro-politics that govern its distribution. Something about those blank places in our knowledge calls for explanation. Why is so little said on these particular scores? International agencies cer¬ tainly know that unequal access to food is the result of social inequali¬ ties. They are discussing programs to improve the living conditions of the poorest segments of the developing countries.

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