Food Familiarity and Novelty in a Condition of Socio-economic Transformation in North-Central Ethiopia

Abstract

This article is about ideas and practices concerning production, distribution, preparation and consumption of food among the Argobbā of Ethiopia. It examines how Argobbā consumers have become accustomed to foreign foods and new modes of preparation and distribution of foods; how such changes have also altered the ways in which food has expressed social relations in terms of class, ethnic and gender identity; and looks at food politics and aesthetics and the gendered meanings behind the organisation of Argobbā menus and meals in changing environmental and socio-economic conditions. The article explores the nature of meals, not only how they emphasise and formalise gender difference and how children are socialised within gendered relations embedded in food ways, but also how the organisation of dinner ‘tables’ or plates reflects social differentiation that is loaded with gender meanings. It also analyses the extent to which meals construct social boundaries by focusing on the nature of ritual meals in Argobbā households and by discussing the ways in which cooking and cuisine reflect local, regional and national socio-economic changes resulting from environmental disturbances, reorientation of regional trade routes, and internal and external market exchanges. The article describes the contrasts between plenty and scarcity, tradition and modernity, hunger and satiety, and finally change and continuity.

Notes

1. Early works, such as Robertson-Smith, Lectures which is a systematic account of sacrifice, place great emphasis on the commensality of the shared meal as symbolic of social bonds and as an important aspect of ritual enactments. Fortes, ‘Food in the Domestic Economy’ describes Tallensi food items and domestic relations; Richards, Land, Labour and Diet examines economic aspects of Bemba food products; Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific describes and analyses Trobriand pigs and yams; Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion explains how the Nuer practice of sharing food defines social groups; Firth, ‘Sociological Study of Native Diet’ confirms that indigenous edible things have sociological meanings; and Mead ‘The Changing Significance of Food’ looks at the changing significance of food elements. Similarly, theoretical dimensions of food taboos have been discussed by Douglas, Purity and Danger; Leach, ‘Anthropological Aspects’; Levi-Strauss, ‘The culinary Triangle’ and Tambiah, ‘Animals are Good’. For Turner, Forest of Symbols, food products are highly charged symbols while for Goody, Cooking, Cuisine and Class, food is an indicator of social inequalities and social competition that can mask authority, hierarchy and power relations. Caplan, Feasts, Fasts, Famine and, I would add ‘for feeling’, Appadurai, ‘Dietary Improvisation’ have also captured the imagination of modern ethnographers.

2. For a recent work on čat (Catha edulis) – a small tree or shrub, whose young leaves, stem tips, and tender bark are chewed for their stimulating effect – see Cassanelli, ‘Qat’ and the rich list of references at the end of his article.

3. From early on we know the Argobbā as Muslim traders whose entire ethos is defined by Islamic beliefs, permeating all aspects of life and providing ideological support for trading activities and religious sanction for dietary rules. Indeed the Argobbā are Muslim in both the religious and ethnic sense, and Islam with all its shari'a-based constituencies and distinctions between edible (halal) and non-edible (haram) foods is thus deep rooted and well understood by Argobbā Muslims.

4. In developing the concept of ‘power in the domestic domain’, I was stimulated by the use by Netting, Smallholders, Householders, in a very different context, of the concept of power and gender in the rural household.

5. The ordering of the elements of cuisine is an aspect of the material act of cooking and a tool that allows the combination of raw ingredients and preparation for consumption. The fact that Argobbā cuisine involves use of such a socio-cultural definition thus reveals the close connection between diet and cuisine, the cultural ordering of food products, and cooking. The rules of a specific cuisine, distilled as they are from the ‘sedimentation’ of thousands of past meals, are then distinctly tailored to fit the material fabric of the society in question. When these conditions change as, for example, with the growing scarcity of relishes and increasing presence of foreign food products in the Argobbā rural settlements, the rules of cuisine must in turn be adjusted to conform to the norm of the new conditions. Cuisine, as is argued in Goody, Cooking, Cuisine and Class, 63–64, does not passively follow behind material practice; however, people also deploy resources and make choices according to needs and desires that have been culturally determined.

6. For a comprehensive analysis of the importance of this vegetable in African markets and diets, see Clark, Onions Are My Husband.

7. Here chickens are being discussed in terms of their place in the diet, despite significant differences in their roles in Argobbā cuisine. Fowl flesh food products are softer and tastier than animal meats but they are also cheaper to sacrifice and serve to guests.

8. Even the current version contains elements derived from the folk cosmology of these early periods.

9. Various Wälasma leaders collected the sorghum crop from different parts of the Argobbā rural homelands for offerings. The religious act of following the orders of Allāh who gave sorghum seeds to humans and offering to Him their harvest in return involved the political act of collecting the sorghum crop from Argobbā peasants.

10. See for example: Pearce, Life and Adventures, 201; Harris, Highlands of Aethiopia, 146; Rochet d'Hericourt, Second Voyage, 87.

11. In the harvest ritual, the Wälasma and the Argobbā offer the new crops of sorghum from the various fields. If the various fields chosen for the ritual are a symbolic representation of the Argobbā rural homelands as a whole, then the distinction between the types of rituals is inconsequential, at least on a conceptual level, although it is significant from the perspective of the Argobbā themselves. Throughout the Argobbā rural homelands, a number of valleys, ponds, mountains, hills, and rocks function as sūf sacred places where supernatural powers are thought to reside and receive commensal rituals.

12. Sorghum and sorghum products such as bread and qäribo have been the food and beverage for commensality between the Argobbā and Allāh, on the one hand, and among the Argobbā, on the other. The two essential components of most Argobbā rituals and festivals are those involving offerings to Allāh, and the feast with the host and the guests. Although other food items are also used, sorghum and sorghum products are indispensable for both.

13. Cash currency and sorghum present a significant problem for students of symbolism. Objects do not cry out with a specific meaning, but rather actors assign meanings to symbolic objects. Yet the basic cultural framework restricts the actors who are not altogether free to assign cultural meanings to, in this case, sorghum and cash economy.

14. Pankhurst, Introduction to the Economic History, 23–25 and Primitive Money, 31–33.

15. Pankhurst, ‘The Maria Theresa Thaler’, 18.

16. Pankhurst, Economic History of Ethiopia, 121.

17. Pankhurst, A Social History of Ethiopia, 96. In the case of the Argobbā, the pervasiveness with which sorghum agriculture and an agrarian image came to represent their rural homelands is well illustrated in the ‘tenant-lord’ relationship between the Argobbā peasants and Wälasma landowners, although this relationship is more a reflection of consumption and dissemination of agrarianism than of its construction. Indeed, the sorghum tax which was based on the putative yield of sorghum then symbolised an important expression of wealth and power of the Wälasma landowners.

18. Not only ritual but the notion of ‘belief’, too, was originally linked to economics. Pouillon discusses belief (la croyance) under the heading of ‘economic obligations’: see Pouillon, ‘Remarks on the Verb “To Believe”’ Many other contemporary French scholars follow this line, including Belmont, ‘Superstition and Popular religion’ and Herrenschmidt, ‘Sacrifice’ both in Izard ed., Between Belief and Transgression.

19. Precious objects, money and quasi-money are all mediums of exchange, but they all change hands. In many societies, precious goods originate as a medium of exchange between deities and humans, thereby assigning religious meaning to these goods and to ‘economic’ transactions.

20. Pankhurst, Primitive Money, 14.

21. Godelier, Perspectives in Marxist Anthropology, 51.

22. Olmstead, Women Between Two Worlds, 65.

23. These adjustments have been made with as little apparent discomfort as that undergone in earlier decades by consumers in the industrialised world, where a continuity of supply of exotic food products has come to be seen as a matter of material and social enrichment by the majority of those involved in such consumption.

24. Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 69.

25. Firth, ‘Sociological Study of Native Diet’, 17.

26. Illich, Toward a History of Needs, 23.

27. Mintz, Sweetness and Power, p.28.

28. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 55; Foucault, L'Archeologie, 29.

29. Hyden, ‘Beyond Intensification’, 418.