Richard Wilk
Richard Wilk is Professor
of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Indiana University Belize
Abstract
The
attraction of foreign goods and fashions is often a volatile and controversial
issue for countries as they become more firmly enmeshed in global media and
trade systems. On one hand they offer excitement and the allure of difference,
but they can also come to represent the weakness of local culture, the decay of
indigenous traditions, and a loss of authenticity and identity. This paper
works towards an understanding of why the foreign appears sometimes so
alluring, and other times so threatening. Food and cuisine are used to
illustrate the major points.
In
physical terms a hamburger is a relatively simple object – a cooked patty of
ground meat inserted into a round bun. But culturally and politically, the
hamburger has proven to be as complex and powerful as any of the electronic
devices like cell phones which are transforming our world. What could give such
a simple foodstuff an allure which attracts millions every day to eat something
which has never before been part of their cuisine or way of life? And what
could make the same hamburger so dangerous that politicians give impassioned
speeches against it, and people go out to demonstrate in the streets to stop it
being served?
The
hamburger is just one of the many objects, symbols, and people set in motion by
the forces of globalization, which are capable of arousing strong passions,
provoking new kinds of conflict. But food and cuisine are an exceptionally
fertile way to understand and trace the way that globalization works, both as
an objective cultural and economic phenomenon, and as a rhetorical field where
a number of interests converge. This is because food is always both a physical
substance which can be traced from origin to consumption and at the same time
an object of intense emotional concern that is full of cultural meaning, so it
is always a matter of public debate. Food is always embodied material culture- it enters our bodies and becomes part of
us in an intimate way beyond any other thing we consume. This means that food
is always deeply connected to our conceptions of health and wellbeing, and it
therefore unavoidably connects meaningful symbols with practicalities and the
hard facts of existence. From the standpoint of a social scientist food also
has the great advantage of being a universal topic, something almost everyone
is willing to talk about, and sharing meals is always an entry point to wider
social understanding.
The
literature on food in the social sciences has tended to concentrate on the
positive ways that meals and sharing food brings people together in social
collectivities. Food binds and integrates, and a cuisine cements social
identity. But food also expresses (and sometimes causes) cultural conflict,
rebellion, and disunity, and meals can also be events which cause pain and
alienation – topics which have all been relatively neglected by scholars.
The
negative potential of food as an element in social conflict is especially
apparent in modern globalizing industrial food systems where the sources and
quality of food are increasingly invisible to consumers (see Lien and Nerlich
2004). We are all familiar with many recent cases where real or imagined
adulteration or contamination has led to widespread fear about the safety of
food. Anxiety about science and technological change is often expressed through
protests and arguments about the genetic, chemical, or radiation content of
foodstuffs. And hostility towards immigrants or foreign cultural influence may
also focus on particular kinds of cuisine, or a chain of restaurants.
Throughout the world, for example, first Coca-cola and then McDonalds became
symbols of American cultural imperialism, and attracted hostility and protest
ranging from Charles De Gaul’s
withdrawal from NATO (Kuisel 1993) to mass demonstrations against the
opening of a McDonalds outlet in Oaxaca, Mexico (Weiner 2002, Pilcher 2006).
Two centuries prior, American colonists were dumping British tea into Boston
In
the central American/Caribbean country of Belize ,
where I have been doing research for thirty-five years now, one of the
consequences of recent trends in global migration has been a large influx of immigrants
from Hong Kong and mainland Chinese. Some have
been quite prosperous and have built large housing estates and businesses,
while others have scratched out a living in small shops and restaurants.[1] At
the peak of the migration in the late 1990s, as the country was going through
other wrenching economic and social changes, many local people, particularly
those in business and government, complained that the Chinese were buying all
the valuable real estate in the country. Few noted that locally born Belizeans
were making a lot of money selling
their property to the Chinese; they accused “those aliens” (as the Chinese were
increasingly called, along with other recent immigrants) of “taking over the
place.”
The
popular side of hostility towards Chinese immigration was often expressed
through complaints about their food. While Chinese restaurants have been
popular in all Belizean towns for well over a century, the new wave of
immigrants opened take-away stands offering small portions of fried chicken and
other familiar foods at very low prices. The low price of “dolla fry chiken”
made it immensely popular, and extremely controversial. Public health officials
blamed the Chinese for rising rates of high blood pressure and diabetes.
Newspaper articles decried the way cheap Chinese fried chicken was debasing
traditional cuisine, and driving Belizean restaurants out of business.
In
1996 I listened to a morning radio call-in show, a very popular form of entertainment
in Belize Belize
I
heard this same kind of ugly discourse about Chinese chicken from friends and
acquaintances in public and private during the 1990s while I was working in Belize
Neophobia
and Neophilia
Why
and when does the flow of people and cuisine produce hostility, fear and
disgust, as opposed to openness towards the exotic, or even fascination,
faddism and interest? Mintz (1996) has suggested that there is something of a
paradox when it comes to public attitudes of like and dislike towards local and
foreign foods, for at times foodways and diet appear deeply rooted in
longstanding and rigid cultural patterns and at other times they seem
completely and suddenly changeable. So, for example, Ohnukey-Tierney tells us
that rice eating is fundamentally connected to being Japanese, to the point
where there is a spiritual identity between rice and personhood (1993). But
then, what are we to make of a recent generation of Japanese teenagers who
hardly eat rice at all? Have they stopped being Japanese? And Mintz points out
that Americans who once thought of raw fish as inedible and disgusting, and
Japanese food as tasteless and laughable, switched in a relatively short period
of time into the largest sushi-consuming country in the world.
It
is clear therefore that sometimes, and for some people, protecting food traditions
and keeping them the same, rooted in time and place, can mean a great deal. McDonalds as a symbol of Americanization
threatens French cultural identity, and drinking Cola instead of wine erodes
the distinctiveness of what it means to be French rather than just
European. Even recently invented food traditions
can be a vehicle for national discovery, as Appadurai documents in his study of
the way the Indian nation was mapped and solidified by the writing of regional
cookbooks in the postcolonial period (1988). My own work in Belize
The
focus on local cuisine is often bolstered by local food historians, and efforts
to protect traditional sources of ingredients, or preserve particular bakeries,
mills, or farms. Government subsidies may be turned to maintaining traditional
varieties of crops, banking seeds, or granting protection by recognizing local
trademarks, names, or appellations. In the USA Berry
But
food is also entertainment, and cooking and eating a particular cuisine does
not necessarily have anything to do with identity at all. When I ask my
undergraduate students if eating in a Chinese restaurant makes them feel
Chinese, they laugh. Eating out in an
ethnic restaurant can be no more than entertainment, or a source of variety, completely
superficial. Foreign food can be kept at
a safe distance, so that eating pizza, sushi, of Argentine steak has no more
cultural significance than the fact that coffee and bananas comes from South
America, or chocolate from Africa . Clearly,
this is much easier if you belong to a rich and powerful country, a place which
can pick and choose, rather than one where foreign influence is forced down
your throat by a dominating or colonial power.
At
the other end of the scale, there are many people who actively seek foreign
food, who find it exciting, interesting, exotic and enticing. For hundreds
(perhaps thousands) of years familiarity and comfort with foreign food has been
part of the repertoire of sophistication in most civilizations, one of the
essentials of cultural capital which distinguishes the educated and experienced
and gives them cultural capital. French cuisine has been the dominant
international standard for so long that elements of French technique have been
absorbed and indigenized into most national traditions. Like French ideas of
diplomacy and etiquette, French cuisine is also the basis for the modern international standards found all over
the world embedded in state institutions, tourism, and business.
Cuisine
is of course part of an important business, and promoting a variety of cuisines
is a major way of growing the size of the consuming public. The “foodie”
industry and press are well established in Europe and the United States , and are rapidly growing in Asia,
Eastern Europe, and Latin America . A large
part of the population in North American cities reads the daily food press,
tries out new restaurants, and searches for new cuisines and taste sensations.
They create add-on markets for ingredients, implements, and cooking classes,
and feed the rapid growth of the food-tourism industry, which takes diners out
into the world to experience exotic food first hand. This is an important
economic force promoting food neophilia,
the desire to experience new taste sensations.
Globalization
and the status of Local Culture
When
we talk about globalization, modernization, rapid cultural change, an influx of
people, ideas, media or culture, the silent assumption which always lies
beneath the surface is that the opposite
of these terms is somehow normal. In
other words, when we say that globalization is the exception, we are silently
affirming that a normal world is a local one, a place where people and things
stay in one place, where ideas are stable and relatively static. This is a
commonplace assumption in food studies, where scholars generally begin with the
idea that every place has its own local culinary customs, established through
immemorial custom and steeped in time. The “indigenous” is the natural
pre-existing state, which make the “foreign” into something eternally new,
always anomalous and dangerous. Anthropologists working in Africa and Latin America have been attacking these ideas over the
last few decades, arguing that both local and foreign are equally constructed,
historically contingent, and always changing. But from the vantage point of
Europe and Asia with their long literate
traditions, the idea that each place has its own terroir, its folk culture,
rooted in the historical past is still accepted as self-evident by most people,
even if they strongly disagree over just what that local culture really is.
This
is why recent historical research on the European origins of the concept of the
“indigenous” is particularly exciting; it shows how earlier periods of
globalization were responsible for the very invention
of our ideas of local culture, local nature, terroir, and all the cultural
superstructures like cuisines which have been erected around them. Buried deep
in European history, an early struggle between neophobics and neophilics created
a shower of ideas and concepts which became the taken-for-granted bedrock of
the ideology through which their descendents see the world, as well as the way
today’s social scientists analyze it.
In
the 1520s, Paracelsus, a
German-speaking itinerant preacher and medical entrepreneur living in what is
now part of Switzerland ,
wrote a book titled “Herbarius,” or a treatise “Concerning the Powers of the
Herbs, Roots, Seeds, Etc., of the Native
Land
But
a major impetus that sparked Paracelsus, and his followers who invented a
robust tradition of herbalism and local natural history, were the deeply
unsettling emotions raised by an influx of foreign medicine – the consequence
of overseas exploration and international trade (in short, early forms of
globalization). Cooper quotes Paracelsus:
Moreover, there are
in Germany so many more and
better medicines than are to be found in Arabia, Chaldaea ,
Persia , and Greece Italy ,
France Italy
Later
writers in this tradition went on to elaborate the doctrine that because
Germans were the product of German climate, food and nature, only German herbs and medicines could
effectively cure them of their ills. While Cooper does not stretch this point
in her book, it is not hard to see the historical connection forward to notions
of Geist and Volk which romantically identified a unique spirit of a people with
their place of origin. It is also not too hard to see a pecuniary interest on
the part of local herbalists and healers, whose livelihoods were threatened by
an influx of exotic medicines imported and sold by urban merchants. Why should
we be consuming stale, possibly contaminated, mysteriously foreign goods which
have passed through the hands of strangers, sold by rich urban merchants, when
we could be using the products of our own soil, our own people, sold by honest
country folk? The eye of suspicion is cast at those over-sophisticated urban
people who follow fashion, use the latest imported goods, and in the process
may be weakening the German essence within themselves, or perhaps even within
society at large.
Cooper
herself is concerned with tracing how this nativist herbal tradition fed the
nascent science of natural history, and its establishment within European
universities at a crucial time. She makes a convincing argument that the
impetus to invent the local and indigenous as a counterpoint to the foreign was
a key foundation in the origin of western natural science, particularly the
classifications of plants and animals which were later codified by Linnaeus.
As
far as I know, nobody has traced the connection of early herbalism to the
development of cooking, or to nascent ideas about German culinary identity. But
that is not really important for my broader point – even in Europe
the cultural definition of the local and national was historically part of the process of globalization itself. When people are exposed to
foreign goods, especially novel ones which challenge culturally important
consumption practices, some will always react by inventing tradition.[3]
This means they will choose some subset of existing practice and codify it,
grace it with a title, and establish it as a standard. As I argued more
generally in a study of Mayan ethnohistory, tradition often crystallizes and
takes a ‘timeless’ form at times of cultural crisis when people perceive their
way of life to be under attack (Wilk 1991).
The
unique contribution of the herbalists of sixteenth century Germany Parma
Instead,
as Paracelsus’ example demonstrates, an awareness of the value of the local
grows only in the presence of an alternative, and not just any alternative. If nobody was attracted by the allure of the
foreign, the local would be in no danger and there would be no need to protect
it. The only reason one would have to make noise about the normal daily bread
on the table, is if it appears about to be replaced by rice, noodles, or corn
flakes. The important spice which makes that daily bread suddenly worthy of an
ideology is fear that something is going to be lost, and this is exactly the
same spice which makes exotic food seem dangerous and unhealthy. But why should
the same taste appear so enticing in some settings, and repellent in others?
Winners, Losers and
Social Competition
Anthropologists,
ancient historians and archaeologists have long been interested in the impetus
which drives people to want foreign goods. Looking back into prehistory, it is
sometimes possible to find justifications based on “simple” utilitarian
arguments. For example, ancient civilizations in flood plain areas sometimes
lacked hard stone for making tools, and other areas suffered shortages of salt
or other critical minerals and this served as an impetus to trade (Rathje
1972). But early civilizations traded much more than utilitarian stone and
salt. Ancient trade routes moved huge quantities of products which cannot be
seen as immediately “useful;” sea shells, brightly colored stones, decorated
pottery, sculpture, cosmetics, beads, decorative metal, hides, ivory, fine
cloth, worked bone, incense, spices, saps or gums, oils, and wine. What made these materials and objects so
desirable that people were willing to work hard to make things to trade for
them, to engage with strangers in what might be dangerous transactions, or to
travel long distances?
Kent Flannery (1968)
was the first archaeologist to notice that growth in early trade was always
closely correlated with the rise of social hierarchy, in other words, with the
origins of inherited class
differentiation among societies which had previously been homogeneous
farming villages with no status differences. He argued that when social inequality was
emerging in small-scale societies, those who were seeking to establish their
power sought exotic goods, especially the kinds of goods which had symbolic
power, particularly if they had already been adopted by a more powerful distant
civilization. In local small-scale struggles over land, water, kinship, labor
and other resources, foreign objects can have tremendous symbolic power.
This, Flannery
said, is why early art styles spread so rapidly over large areas, a point amplified
by Mary Helms in an encyclopedic study of the symbolic power of imported goods
in chiefly societies in the ethnohistorical
record of the Americas (1988). Simply put, foreign goods become the
tokens of power and sophistication. A local status system emerges where styles
and fashions “trickle down” from the elite which controls their importation. There
may even be sumptuary laws which restrict the consumption of the highest valued
goods to nobility. One can point to many historic examples; the way the Japanese
elite imported Chinese writing, religion, and court culture at the peak of
their power struggles for hegemony over the island in the sixth century AD, or
the popularity of Greek art among aspiring elites throughout the eastern Mediterranean in the “Hellenistic” period.[5]
While in its barest
form Flannery’s argument is simplistic, it is a powerful tool for understanding
one of the forces which drives neophilia, the thirst for the foreign. In any
sociopolitical system, established power rests to some extent on control of
property and knowledge, rooted in history, family and place, a source which is
inherently conservative and self-perpetuating. At the same time, within any
system there are also factions, divisions, and subordinate groups which seek advancement
and advantage, particularly during times of instability and transition. This is
all we need to create opportunities for the interplay between neophobia and
neophilia; people whose status and position is threatened by imported goods,
trends, and fashions which they do not control, and those who stand to benefit
from the same.
Of course the
reality is more complex. Perhaps in the early stages of the development of
civilization there was a real potential for foreign objects and ideologies to
really cause revolutionary change. We can certainly point to the spread of the
worlds “great religions” like Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam as events when
such sweeping social transformations were often prompted by foreign ideas. But
most political regimes quickly learned to gain tight control over trade and
contact across their borders, so the play between localists and globalists was
largely carried out among factions within existing powerful classes, taking
away its potential for causing social revolution. By the Sixteenth century, most European
elites had found ways to control and accommodate consumer culture in ways which
were hardly threatening to the established order of things. The rich and parts
of the new middle classes became “fashion leaders” who pioneered new
consumption trends for items like coffee, sugar, magazines, novels, musical
instruments, appliances, toys, and cosmetics, which gradually diffused downward
through the social scale as they became cheaper. The intellectual classes became the main
arbiters for the entry of foreign music, art, ideology and decorative crafts.
In this way, over
time some kinds of foreign products and styles become ‘legitimate’ and familiar
(under control), like French cuisine and Italian opera for example, while other
kinds are dangerous and threaten the established order. Subordinate groups may
seize on these “illegitimate” foreign fashions and goods as symbols of
rebellion – though because these are real goods with real economic value, a
change in fashion may truly have a destabilizing economic impact by changing
mass consumption patterns. When
middle-class Austrian youth in the early 1950s began to buy American clothes
and music, as their passion for American pop music developed, they did more
than outrage the taste of the established elite; they also created new economic
niches and industries and developed new forms of consumer culture (Wagnleitner
1994).
Concluding
thoughts
When Belize was
still a British colony, the European styles of cuisine favored by the local
elite were considered the only legitimate form of cooking for public events,
weddings, and other festivities. The rituals of European dining were performed
at formal dinners at the Governor’s residence, in the homes of diplomats and
other members of the upper crust, in clubs, and in one or two restaurants in
the hotels deemed fit for foreign visitors. Even if the actual food that was
served could rarely meet European standards, because so much of it came from
tins and stale packages, it was served “correctly” and eaten with the proper
ceremony. The same standards were displayed and taught to the public in diverse
settings, including church events like ice cream socials and tea parties, and
the balls and dances held by fraternal and Masonic lodges.
The firm cultural
hegemony of British high culture was policed by the thorough censorship of
foreign films and press, and tight import controls which were aimed
particularly at keeping out American popular culture. These controls all began
to crumble during the 1970s as more and more Belizeans began to migrate to the USA
Many different
groups in the country found this influx dangerous and frightening, and there
was a great deal of agitation by church, state, and the educational
establishment to restrict television programming. The stage was set for a continuing interplay
between neophilia and neophobia. But it is important to note two key aspects of
this counterpoint, as different groups coalesce around positions of loyalty to
the indigenous, and enthusiasm for the imported in different cultural arenas.
First, the
coalitions and positions, and indeed the kinds of objects and goods which
arouse strong emotions and political discourse are constantly changing.
Baseball, seen in the early 1980s by many working class Belizeans as an alien
sport, whose popularity was endangering the traditional sports of cricket and
soccer, has receded into the background and achieved a loyal, but limited
following mainly as a spectator sport to be watched on television. American hip
hop and rap music provoked a similar reaction amongst different groups later in
the decade; a strong revival of Belizean musical traditions in the 1990s, which
even saw Belizean artists achieve success in international venues, seems to
have set many of these anxieties to rest.
Second, new
technologies and means of communication constantly seem to threaten to undercut
and destroy the social order through which fashion and taste are controlled,
yet social order persists. The opening of borders, the arrival of new
immigrants, a flush of new prosperity, satellite television and the internet
all seem to promise completely new avenues for people to find new tastes, new
styles of consumption, which do not “trickle down” through a status hierarchy
from above, or flow through the tastemaking channels of a local artistic or
cultural elite. Why bother with the local provincial elites if you can watch MTV
and see what people in New York and Hollywood
Nothing of the sort
is about to happen, for the basic reasons that consumption is always embodied and socialized. Consumption is more than simply a matter of choice; as
Bourdieu effectively argued, it is embodied through what he called hexis, the daily habitus which tells us
what tastes and feels right. This is why we feel ridiculous wearing the wrong
colors, and uncomfortable eating a food at the wrong time of day. It does not
prevent us from changing our behavior, but it provides a kind of friction, a
drag on choice and change which means we cannot simply decide to switch diets
or transform our mode of dress overnight without paying a substantial cost. No
matter how weary we may be of familiar routines, following them is usually a
lot easier than changing them, unless of course everyone else in your circle is
also changing at the same time. And this is the crux of the socialized,
communal aspect of all consumption, that we do it as much for and with others
as for ourselves. Though everyone in a consumer society seeks a sort of
individuality, in daily practice they seek to fit in with familiar groups, to
do what is socially acceptable. Your curiosity may lead you to try eating
Laotian vegetarian food, but unless you find others who share your passion, it
is unlikely that you will continue for long. The vast spaces of choice opened
up by new media and the internet have really opened up new niches for professional
tastemakers, critics, and fashion leaders, who broker, translate and channel
consumption trends in ways which often appear strikingly traditional, rather
than transformative.
This has not been a
complete answer to my starting question – why should a hamburger arouse such
strong passions? But it does suggest that by the time one has finished making a
detailed study of the political and social meaning of the hamburger in any
particular time and place, public attention will have already moved onward to
some other significant object of both desire and fear.
References
Cited
Appadurai,
Arjun 1988 How to Make a National
Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India
Flannery,
Kent V. 1968 ‘The Olmec and the Valley of Oaxaca
Dumbarton Oaks Conference on the Olmec. pp. 79-117.Washington D.C.
Dumbarton Oaks Conference on the Olmec. pp. 79-117.
Helms,
Mary 1988 Ulysses' Sail: An Ethnographic Odyssey of Power, Knowledge, and
Geographical Distance. Princeton ,
N.J. : Princeton University
Hobsbawm, E., & Ranger, T. (Eds.) 1983 The Invention of Tradition.
Kuisel, Richard 1993 Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization.
Lien, Marianne, and Brigitte Nerlich, eds. 2004 The Politics of Food.
Mintz,
Moran, Bruce T. “The Herbarius of Paracelsus,” Pharmacy in History 35 (I993): 99-I27.
Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko, 1993 Rice as Self. Princeton:
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Rathje, W. L. 1972 Praise the Gods and Pass the Metates: An Hypothesis of the Development of Lowland Rainforest Civilizations in
Wagnleitner, Reinhold 1994 Coca-Colonization and the Cold War. Chapel Hill:
Weiner, Tim 2002 Mexicans Resisting McDonald’s Fast Food Invasion. New York Times, August 24.
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[1] At various times in the late 1980s and 90s the Belize government
had a program which offered citizenship to immigrants who paid US$50,000 and
agreed to invest in the country, which was a major incentive for those seeking
to flee the impending Chinese takeover of Hong Kong. It is also much easier to
get a tourist visa or green card to enter the USA
from Belize than from China , so Belize
became a stopover for prospective emigrants to the USA Belize over the ‘sale of citizenship’
contributed to some hostility to Chinese immigrants, but it is important to
remember that many Chinese families have been established in Belize
[2]Cooper 2007:27, quoting the translation of Paracelsus by Moran
1993:104.
[3] Hobsbawm and Ranger suggest that this is one of the reasons why
traditions are invented in their introduction to their book of the same name
(1983).
[4] It is ironic that as archaeology and prehistory advanced as
sciences, they proved that nothing about human culture in Europe
could be seen as truly “indigenous.” Agriculture came from the east,
civilization from the south, and repeated migration and population movements
obscure any attempt to read modern nations back into the past, despite the
efforts of nationalists to manipulate the facts. Everything about origins and
locality depends on the size of the time frame, and ultimately all humans are Africans.
[5] I discuss some further contemporary parallels in Wilk (2004).
