by Barbara Miller
Food is a hot and rising topic in cultural anthropology, related fields from literature to political science, and in popular culture as well. Besides the wealth of publications about food in recent years and a spike in interest from my students, I know this to be true for another reason: For decades, the short article on food (with a couple of recipes) in the weekly New York Times Magazine recently moved up near the front of the magazine, no longer relegated to its traditional placement way at the end near the crossword puzzle.
This post highlights an intriguing article by Stephan Palmié, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago, published in a special edition of the journal African Arts devoted to the topic of “hybrid heritage.”
He draws on the longstanding theme in the anthropology of food and cuisine that specific foods and ways of preparing them serve as emblematic markers of cultural identities. He builds on this foundation to examine how particular culinary “recipes” demarcate social boundaries especially when they become objectified and of value as intellectual property or intangible cultural heritage.
Palmié draws on a variety of secondary sources to reveal the links in the United States between African food and racism. Over time and in different ways, it has either erased the importance of African foodways through de-authentication or appropriated it through identity theft or culinary colonialism. On the upside, he recommends to us a “fascinating monograph of culinary history that doubles (or triples!) as cookbook and gastropolitical manifesto”: Diane Spivey’s The Peppers, Cracklings, and Knots of Wool Cookbook. Spivey turns the table and provides an Africentric view of human food from our prehistoric origins in Africa to how African foodways have shaped French and Chinese cuisine. Her book is definitely on my holiday reading list!
Image from SUNY Press.
anthropologyworks 