Rice Talks

Nir Avieli

Description

The culinary life of a Vietnamese town

Rice Talks explores the importance of cooking and eating in the everyday social life of Hoi An, a properous market town in central Vietnam known for its exceptionally elaborate and sophisticated local cuisine. In a vivid and highly personal account, Nir Avieli takes the reader from the private setting of the extended family meal into the public realm of the festive, extraordinary, and unique. He shows how foodways relate to class relations, gender roles, religious practices, cosmology, ethnicity, and even local and national politics. This evocative study departs from conventional anthropological research on food by stressing the rich meanings, generative capacities, and potential subversion embedded in foodways and eating.

Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Deciphering the Hoianese Meal
2. The Social Dynamics of the Home Meal
3. Local Specialties–Local Identity
4. Feasting with the Dead and the Living
5. Wedding Feasts: From Culinary Scenarios to Gastro-anomie
6. Food and Identity in Hoianese Community Festivals
7. Rice-cakes and Candied Oranges: Culinary Symbolism
in the Big Vietnamese Festivals
Conclusion: Food and Culture Interconnections
Epilogue: Doing Fieldwork in Hoi An
Glossary
Notes
References
Index

Sujets

• Cuisine
• Cuisine du monde
• Cuisine d'Asie
• Asian Studies
• Asian Cooking
• Ethnic Cooking
• Regional cooking
• Vietnamese
• Southeast Asia
• Cooking
• Anthropology
• Asian
• Asia
• Culture
• Cuisine d'Europe
• Cuisine d'Europe

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 30 avril 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253005304
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Rice Talks

Rice Talks
FOOD AND COMMUNITY IN A VIETNAMESE TOWN

Nir Avieli
Indiana University Press
BLOOMINGTON AND INDIANAPOLIS
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, Indiana 47404-3797 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
Telephone orders
800-842-6796
Fax orders
812-855-7931
Orders by e-mail
[e-mail]
2012 by Nir Avieli
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photo copying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging- in-Publication Data
Avieli, Nir.
Rice talks : food and community in a Vietnamese town /Nir Avieli.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-35707-6 (cloth : alk. paper)
-ISBN 978-0-253-22370-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
-ISBN 978-0-253-00530-4 (e-book) 1. Food habits-Vietnam-H i An. 2. Food-Social aspects-Vietnam-H i An. 3. Gastronomy- Vietnam-H i An. 4. Cooking, Vietnamese. 5. H i An (Vietnam)-Social life and customs. I. Title.
GT2853.V5A85 2012
394.1 2095975-dc23
2011028385
1 2 3 4 5 17 16 15 14 13 12
To my parents Elyakum
(1937-2004)

Aviva
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration
Introduction
1 Deciphering the Hoianese Meal
2 The Social Dynamics of the Home Meal
3 Local Specialties, Local Identity
4 Feasting with the Dead and the Living
5 Wedding Feasts: From Culinary Scenarios to Gastro-anomie
6 Food and Identity in Community Festivals
7 Rice Cakes and Candied Oranges: Culinary Symbolism in the Big Vietnamese Festivals
Conclusion: Food and Culture-Interconnections
Epilogue: Doing Fieldwork in Hoi An
Glossary
Notes
References
Index
Preface
Food, like the air we breathe, is vital for our physiological survival. Food is also the most perfect cultural artifact, the outcome of a detailed differentiation process, whereby wheat grains are transformed into French baguettes, Italian pasta, or Chinese steamed buns, each encompassing a world of individual, social, and cultural identities: The way any human group eats, Claude Fischler (1988: 275) points out, helps it assert its diversity, hierarchy and organization food is central to individual identity, in that any human individual is constructed biologically, psychologically and socially by the food he/she chooses to incorporate.
The power of food is epitomized by the process of incorporation (literally, into [the] body ), in which culturally transformed edible matter crosses the borders of the body (ibid. 279) and breaches the dichotomy between outside and inside, between the World and the Self. No other cultural artifact penetrates our bodies with such immediacy and thoroughness. As Brillat-Savarin s aphorism You are what you eat suggests, when we eat we become consumers (and reproducers) of our culture, physically internalizing its principles and values. Hence, when Brahmins partake of their vegetarian meals, they express their commitment to the sanctity of life and to the principle of nonviolence; equally, when Argentinian gauchos bite into their bloody steaks, they reaffirm their masculinity and the violent vitality that distinguishes their lifestyle.
Yet it is precisely the nature of food as a constant and necessary part of life, consumed habitually and often nonreflexively, that consigns the culinary sphere to banality, unworthy of sustained scholarly attention. Anthropologists tend to give far more weight to substantial aspects of culture, such as kinship, religion, or language, and mention foodways only as a secondary phenomenon. If overlooking the importance of food seems to be rather the norm in anthropology, when it comes to the anthropological study of Vietnam by foreign and local scholars alike, the neglect is almost complete: Huard and Durand (1954), Hickey (1964), Popkin (1979), Jamieson (1995), Kleinen (1999), Malarney (2002), Hardy (2005), Fjelstad and Nguyen (2006), and Taylor (2004, 2007), in their important ethnographies of Vietnam, rarely mention food practices and hardly ever suggest that they may be meaningful in themselves. Even Thomas (2004) and Carruthers (2004), who highlight the importance of food in Vietnamese culture, are mainly concerned with globalization and the diasporic dimensions of Vietnamese cuisine, and overlook daily food habits and their meanings. In this sense, Krowolski and Simon-Baruch s (1993) ethnography of domestic food and eating in Danang is a salient exception.
In this book I approach food and eating differently: focusing on the cultural and social dimensions of the culinary sphere in the small town of Hoi An and emphasizing the motivations and meanings of eating that transcend physiological needs or ecological constraints, I show that looking at foodways allows us to approach Vietnamese society and culture from a unique perspective. This, I demonstrate, is a powerful analytical lens that allows for new insights regarding the phenomenology of being Vietnamese.
As a culinary ethnography of Hoi An, a prosperous market town of some 30,000 people in Central Vietnam, this book describes the local foodways and analyzes their social and cultural features. Hence, Rice Talks is first and foremost intended as a significant contribution to the anthropology of Vietnam, addressing the dearth of studies on Vietnamese foodways and, in particular, the neglect of the complex culinary sphere of Hoi An, a town that has been involved in global trade and cultural exchange for centuries.
Rice Talks is also a theoretical project that seeks to understand the unique position and qualities of the culinary sphere as a cultural arena. As such, it goes beyond the conventional anthropological understanding of food and eating as reflections of other social and cultural phenomena by conceiving of the culinary sphere as an autonomous arena, where cultural production and social change are initiated and elaborated. I focus on the ways by which differing facets of identity such as gender, class, ethnicity, religious propensities, and even political orientations are constructed, maintained, negotiated, challenged, and changed within the culinary sphere.
The ethnographic data presented in this book result from an ongoing project that began in 1998. While my initial twelve months of fieldwork in 1999-2000 laid the foundations for this book, repeated shorter stays of two to three months each year since 2001 have allowed for a close tracking of the powerful processes of development and change that characterized life in Hoi An during this period, and which still continue. Though change is an essential feature of every society and culture, taking it into account has always been problematic in anthropology, as the anthropological moment, as extended as it might be, is limited and not many ethnographers have the privilege of returning time and again to the field.
Repeated periods of research also facilitated a systematic elaboration of ideas that evolved as I was writing the ethnography. Many colleagues point out that while writing, quite a few questions that should have been asked in the field come to mind, but then it is usually too late. I, however, could note down these questions and raise them again when I returned to meet my Hoianese friends and interlocutors. Importantly, my data, findings, and analyses were periodically updated and scrutinized by the same friends and other informants, who were also my harshest critics. Our disagreements and variant interpretations have allowed for the nuanced understanding that this book conveys.
This book is therefore multidimensional and seeks to engage with a variety of questions, some theoretical and some ethnographic, concerning the culinary sphere of Hoi An. It also raises methodological questions and shares some important limitations with its readers: the final chapter is dedicated mainly to the specific problems that arise when studying foodways. But a brief biographical note is in order now.
I first went to Vietnam as a backpacker in late 1993 and fell in love immediately, and for all the wrong reasons, according to my anthropological training. It was warm, green, exotic, and beautiful, and after several months of backpacking in China, it was a relief to feel welcome again. I was struck by the beauty of the country, the endless rice fields, and countless hues of green, the cliffs of Ha Long Bay, the temples and pagodas in the small Red River Delta villages, and the eclectic architecture, lively streets, and colorful markets of Hanoi. I was lucky enough to arrive in Vietnam just before Tet, the Vietnamese New Year Festival, which was one of the loveliest events I had ever witnessed. Above all, I was impressed by the kindness and friendship shown by so many Vietnamese toward a wandering stranger, by their resilience and determination, and last but not least, by their keen sense of humor. The friends I made in Hanoi on that first visit have remained close and significant to this day.
But it was only when I hopped off a 1954-model Renault truck in Hoi An, a small town in Central Vietnam, early in March 1994, that my enchantment and wonder changed to a sense of possible deeper engagement. After exploring the streets of Hoi An s ancient quarter-transported to the Imperial China of my childhood books-and cycling the winding paths of the lush, green delta, which was the most beautiful place I have ever seen, I told my traveling companion, You know, I am coming back here, to Hoi