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Abstract
In China, establishments known as ‘Farmhouse Joy restaurants’ (nongjiale) which originally emerged around the suburbs of big cities and were associated with the foodstuffs of ethnic majority Han Chinese farmers, have now, as a result of a variety of development projects and local initiatives, emerged in ethnic minority and other remote villages located deep in the mountains. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in villages in Hubei and Yunnan provinces, this study examines how a new conception of ‘original ecology’ has played a dynamic role in the transformation of these nongjiale in ethnic and remote areas. This transformation results from a new symbolic synthesis and rapprochement between what are commonly understood to be ‘farmers' foods’, desires to experience an original ecology and understandings of ethnicity in China, a synthetic construction clearly aimed at attracting urbanite consumption. Important differences have emerged between villages participating in this process of synthesis. Those villages with strong claims to ethnic minority status have to carefully convert what are in fact ethnic foods into what are seen as ethnically unmarked ‘farmers' foods' in their nongjiale, while villages without such ethnic backgrounds paradoxically have to construct artificial ethnic symbols by mechanisms of imitation or pretence.
Acknowledgments
The author thanks Harvard Yenching Institute for the helpful visiting scholar program and is also grateful to the anonymous reviewers, Nick Tapp and Philip Taylor for their help.
Funding
This study was supported by China Education Ministry Humanities & Social Science Fund (13YA840026).
Notes
[1] For example, in Malaysia, by changing the name of a particular fish, Chinese restaurants successfully turned this previously non-commercial fish into an expensive and desirable one (Tan Citation2001, 146).
[2] The Slow Food movement was founded by Italian gourmand Carlo Petrini in 1986 and aimed to deal with the uniformity and poor quality of fast food and supermarket chains (Pink Citation2012, 106).
[3] Rural areas in China have undergone rapid changes during the past two decades, including the disappearance of 80–100 villages every day nationwide.
[4] Personal working experience in rural China in the early 1990s, when the Chinese government greatly promoted monoculture in villages.
[5] The New Countryside program (xinnongcun jianshe), which was started in October 2005 in rural China, aimed to increase agricultural production, raise villagers' living standards, civilise rural societies, tidy up village appearances and democratise village management.
[6] For example, Spain, USA, France and Japan. See http://baike.baidu.com/link?url=FBHranYri92KZhGkdzaaSF_RWa4C1FLLpz84FhfDW510pMFDWiFEhIj7WWJpzIFi
[7] Currently, some suburbs of Shanghai have so developed nongjiale that they can serve a very large number of tourists at any one time.
[8] One village called Xihu in Jinxian, a suburban area of Nanchang city, was under large-scale construction to transform the whole village into a nongjiale tourism site.
[9] In 2009 in a village in Huangpi, a suburb of Wuhan city, a villager told me that his wife had been offered a good salary to go to cook for a nongjiale restaurant.
[10] http://travel.gmw.cn/2012–07/26/content_4638188.htm (The Guangming Daily, July 26, 2012); see also http://www.ccmedu.com/bbs/dispbbs.asp?boardid=45&id=172574
[11] Nongjiale in ethnic minority areas were first reported in 2002 by China National Tourism Administration (http://www.cnta.gov.cn:8000/Forms/Search/SearchResultList.aspx?keyWord=%u519c%u5bb6%u4e50&pageSize=20).
[12] CCDPF was one of the four Joint Programs in China funded by the Millennium Development Goals Achievement Fund (MDG-F), established by the Spanish government with the UN in 2006. Funding for CCDPF consisted of 6 million dollars from the MDG-F and 1 million equivalent in kind from the Chinese government. In responding to the ‘Thematic Window on Culture and Development’ opened under the Spanish MDG Achievement Fund, CCDPF aimed to integrate culture into development, specifically in selected marginalised areas of ethnic minority China (see Tapp & Wu Citation2011).
[13] Chinese food shows the important north-south difference and the reasons for this are both cultural and ecological (see Anderson Citation1988; Sterckx Citation2002; Elvin Citation2004)
[14] Fan means the starch staple like rice and cai means meat and vegetable dishes. Chang (Citation1977) found the fan-cai structure was typical to Chinese meals.
[15] See Fiskesjö (Citation1999).
[16] See Fiskesjö (Citation2010).
[17] See Fiskesjö (Citation2010).
[18] Disgusting or tabooed foods can also serve as boundary markers. See Valeri (Citation2000); Wilk (Citation2012); Rozin and Fallon (Citation1987).
[19] Food stereotypes (see de Garine 2001)
[20] Many benefits for ethnic minorities apply to those living in officially recognised autonomous minority areas. However, not all ethnic minorities live inside those areas, which are also inhabited by many Han.
[22] Yulu is a famous brand of Hubei green tea, which became popular in the late Qing dynasty (1644–1911), and originates from the mountains in which Hu village is located.
[23] The head of Hu village was proud of his villagers who were participating in this new rural reconstruction program with great enthusiasm by, for example, converting all their farmlands into tea plantations, renovating their farmhouses according to the officially recommended architectural style, building roads which would connect to a highway and establishing nongjiale restaurants.
[24] Benglong was the traditional name for the De'ang, which they managed to change officially in 1985.
[25] Wuling Mountains cover western Hunan, southwest Hubei, east Chongqing and northeast Guizhou.
[26] As the village head, who disliked such pretence, informed me.
[27] The ancestors of the villagers of today had only migrated into the area after 1735, when the traditional chiefs had already been removed by the Qing emperor.
[28] I was reminded of an old man from the Qin lineage whom I had interviewed in southwest Hubei in 2000, who told me that he felt it was a shame for so many other people to share the Tujia identity, which in his opinion should have been limited to the descendants of these several chiefs' lineages (that is, the Xiang, Tian, Qin surnames and some others).
[29] A typical cultural marker, like the ‘drum tower’, of the Dong ethnic minority elsewhere.