THE A PRIOR1 IN NATURE 8 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger, An Analysis of Concepts Pollution and Taboo, London, 1966. 9 Mary Douglas,'Elicited responses in Lele language*,Kongo- zee, 1950,xui, 4,224-7. 10 Jean Buxton, 'Mandan Witchcraft', in Witchcraft and Sore in East Africa, ed., John Middleton and Edward Winter, Lond 963. eciphering a Meal 11 E. A. Hoebel, The Law of Primitive Man: A Study in Co tive Legal Dynamics, Harvard, 1954. 12 Marcel Mauss and M. H. Beuchat, 'Essai sur les variations nitres des soci6tks Eskimos', L'Annke Sociologique, g ( 39-132. 13 V. C. Wynne-Edwards, Animal Dispersion in Relation to So Behaviour, Edinburgh and New York, 1962. 14 Plato,The Republic,paras 376-92 Lindsay translation, E language is a code, where is the preceded message? The ques- 15 T. S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, hrased to expect the answer: nowhere. In these words a 1962. is questioning a popular analogy.' But try it this way: if 16 1962; William Burroughs, The Naked Lunch, New York, a code, where is the preceded message? Here, on the 1965. thropologist's home ground, we are able to improve the posing the question. A code affords a general set of possibilities for ding particular messages. If food is treated as a code, the odes will be found in the pattern of social rela- essed. The message is about different degrees of sion and exclusion, boundaries and transactions e boundaries. Like sex, the taking of food has a social ell as a biological one.' Food categories therefore ts. To say this is to echo Roland BarthesQn sartorial encoding of social events. His book, Systime de la de, is primarily about methodology, about code-breaking and e-making taken as a subject in itself. The next step for the t of this conceptual tool is to take up a particular 1 events and see how they arc coded. This will understanding of a microscale social system: I start the exercise by analyzing the main food t a particular point in time in a particular social me. The humble and trivial case will open the on of more exalted examples. times at home, hoping to simplify the cooking, I ask, you like to have just soup for supper tonight? I mean a thick soup - instead of supper. It's late and you must be ry. It won't take a minute to serve.' Then an argument 249 THE A PRIOR1 IN NATURE DECIPHERING A MEAL starts: 'Let's have soup now, and supper when you are ready.' which the food meanings encode by an approach which values 'No no, to serve two meals would be more work. But if you like, the binary pairs according to their position in a series. Between why not start with the soup and fill up with pudding?' 'Good breakfast and the last nightcap, the food of the day comes in an heavens I What sort of a meal is that? A beginning and an end ordered pattern. Between Monday and Sunday, the food of the and no middle.' 'Oh, all right then, have the soup as it's there, week is patterned again. Then there is the sequence of holidays and I'll do a Welsh rarebit as well.' When they have eaten soup, and fast days through the year, to say nothing of life cycle feasts, Welsh rarebit, pudding, and cheese: 'What a lot of plates. Why birthdays, and weddings. In other words, the binary or other do you make such elaborate suppers?' They proceed to argue contrasts must be seen in their syntagmatic relations. The chain that by taking thought I could satisfy the full requirements of a which links them together gives each element some of its mean- meal with a single, copious dish. Several rounds of this conver- ing. Livi-Strauss discusses the syntagmatic relation in his earlier sation have given me a practical interest in the categories and book, The Savage Mind, but uses it only for the static analysis of meaning of food. I needed to know what defines the category of a classification systems (particularly of proper names). It is capable meal in our home. of a much more dynamic application to food categories, as The first source for enlightenment will obviously be Claude Michael Halliday has shown. On the two axes of syntagm and Ltvi-Strauss's The Raw and the Cooked and the other volumes of paradigm, chain and choice, sequence and set, call it what you his Mythologiques* which discuss food categories and table will, he has shown how food elements can be ranged until they manners. But this is only a beginning. He fails us in two major are all accounted for either in grammatical terms, or down to the respects. First, he takes leave of the small-scale social relations last lexical item.0 which generate the codification and are sustained by it. Here and Eating, like talking, is patterned activity, and the daily menu there his feet touch solid ground, but mostly he is orbiting in may be made to yield an analogy with linguistic form. Being rarefied space where he expects to find universal food meanings an analogy, it is limited in relevance; its purpose is to throw common to all mankind. He is looking for a preceded, light on, and suggest problems of, the categories of grammar panhuman message in the language of food, and thus exposing by relating these to an activity which is familiar and for much himself to the criticism implicit in the quoted linguist's question. of which a terminology is ready to hand. Second, he relies entirely on the resources of binary analysis. The presentation of a framework of categories for the Therefore he affords no technique for assessing the relative value description of eating might proceed as follows: of the binary pairs that emerge in a local set of expressions. Worse than clumsy, his technical apparatus produces meanings Units: Daily menu which cannot be validated. Yea, or nay, he and Roman Jakobson Meal may be right on the meanings in a sonnet of Baudelaire's.' But Course Helping even if the poet himself had been able to judge between theirs Mouthful and Kiffaterre's alternative interpretation of the same work' and Unit: Daily Menu to say that one was closer to his thought than the other, he - would be more likely to agree that all these meanings are there. Elements of primary struc- E, M, L, S ('early,' 'main,' 'light,' This is fair for literary criticism, but when we are talking of ture 'snack') grammar, coding, and the 'science of the concrete," it is not Primary structures EML EMLS (conflated as Exponents of these elements EML(S)) enough. (primary classes of unit For analyzing the food categories used in a particular family E: I (breakfast) meal') M :2 (dinner) the analysis must start with why those particular categories and L: 3 (no names available; see not others are employed. We will discover the social boundaries S: 4 1 classes) THE A PRIOR1 IN NATURE DECIPHERING A MEAL Secondary structures EL&M ELnM EMLtSb EMS.1 juice/tomato juice Exponents of secondary ele- L:3.1 (lunch) Mi:beef/mutton/pork ments (systems of secondary Lb: 3.2 (high tea) Mb: chicken/turkey/duck/ classes of unit 'meal') L- : 3.3 (supper) goose Si: 4.1(afternoon tea) Sb : 4.2 (nightcap) At the rank of the 'course,' the primary class 'entree' has System of sub-classes of unit E: 1.1 (English breakfast) secondary classes 'meat dish' and 'poultry dish.' Each of these 'meal' 1.2 (continental breakfast) A two secondary classes carries a grammatical system whose terms are formal items. But this system accounts only for Passing to the rank of the 'n leal,' we will follow throueh the , simple structures of the class 'entree,' those made up of only class 'dinner: ' one member of the unit 'helping! The class 'entree,' also Unit: Meal, Class: dinner -+ displays compound structures, whose additional elements have Elements of primary struc- F, S, M, W, Z ('first,' 'secon. as exponents the (various secondary classes of the) classes ture 'main,' 'sweet,' 'savoury') 'cereal' and 'vegetable.' We will glance briefly at these : Primary structures MW MWZ MZW FMW FMW FMZW FSMW FSMWZ Unit: Course, Class: entree FSMZW (conflated as Elements of primary structure J, T, A ('joint,' 'staple,' 'adjunct') (F(S)MW(Z)) Primary structures J JT JA JTA (conflated as Exponents of these elements F: I (antipasta) J(W(A))) (primary classes of unit S: i (fish) Exponents of these elements J: I (flesh) 'course') M : 3 (entree) (primary classes of unit T: 2 (cereal) W : 4 (dessert) 'helping') A: 3 (vegetable) Z : 5 (cheese*) Secondary structures (various, involving - among Secondary structures (various,involving secondary ele- 4 others secondary elements ments F. ..r, M~.I,Wa.0) - J-,i,To, A-,Q) Exponents of secondary ele- Fd:1.1 (soup) Exponents of secondary ele- !-: 1.1 (meat) systems as at ments (systems of secondary Fb: 1.3 (hors'd'oeuvres) ments (systems of secondary Jb: 1.2 (poultry) M in meal classes of unit 'course') Ft: 1.3(fruit) structure Fd: 1.4 (fruit juice) classes of unit 'helping') 1 TÇ2.1 (potato) Ma: 3.1(meat dish) Tb : 2.2 (rice) Mb: 3.2 (poultry dish) A&:3.1 (green vegetable*) W.: 4.1 (fruit*) Ah: 3.2 (root vegetable*) Wb: 4.3 (pudding) We: 4.3 (ice cream*) And so on, until everything is accounted for either in gram- Systems of sub-classes of unit Ft : 1.1 I (clear soup*) matical systems or in classes made up of lexical items (marked 'course' 1.12 (thick soup*) ^,à .,,? ?$ *).