The Raw and the Cooked: The French Meal, or its Transubstantiation as Intangible Cultural Heritage

Abstract

In 2003, UNESCO adopted the Convention for Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage. In 2010, the French meal was added to the list. Directed at process, expression, gesture, intangible heritage attempts to fix meaning from characteristically plastic material—the “conviviality” and “pleasures of taste” that constitute a meal. Taking the French meal as a case study, this essay analyzes the sleight of hand the convention performs—the disappearance of the sensorial thing—through three theoretical lineages: legal definition, cultural history, and taste as aesthetic judgment and sensorial experience. Broadly considered are preservation projects that act as prospective histories yet are manifestly of their time, legitimizing certain national values through the soft power of cultural administration.

Notes

1 Paul Valéry, “Variété,” in Œuvres, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, Pléiade, 1971), 732. Cited in Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol, The Practice of Everyday Life, vol. 2, Living and Cooking, ed. Luce Giard, trans. Timothy J. Tomasik (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 217.

2 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Origin of Table Manners: Introduction to a Science of Mythology, vol. 3, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (London: Jonathan Cape, 1978), 489.

3 See “Text of the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage,” UNESCO, accessed Dec. 1, 2017, http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/en/convention.

4 In fact, there are two lists: Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity and List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding. The French meal belongs to the former.

5 This is a paraphrase of Mounir Bouchenaki in Barry James and International Heritage Tribune, “UNESCO Moving to Broaden its Heritage List,” New York Times, November 15, 2002. Bouchenaki's 2003 keynote address for the ICOMOS 14th General Assembly and Scientific Symposium states this explicitly: “Symbols, technologies and objects are tangible evidence of underlying norms and values. Thus they establish a symbiotic relationship between the tangible and the intangible. The intangible heritage should be regarded as the larger framework within which tangible heritage takes on shape and significance.” Mounir Bouchenaki, “The Interdependency of the Tangible and Intangible Cultural Heritage,” Keynote Address at the ICOMOS 14th General Assembly and Scientific Symposium, Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, October 27–31, 2003.

6 Catherine Ingraham describes this transformation in relation to Vitruvius's caryatides and stories of origin in “The Faults of Architecture: Troping the Proper,” Assemblage 7 (October 1988): 8.

7 See “Nomination File no. 00437” and “Decision of the Intergovernmental Committee: 5.COM 6.14,” UNESCO, accessed Dec. 1, 2017, http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/en/decisions/5.COM/6.14.

8 Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 256.

9 This plot is remarkably similar to Malraux's own biography. André Malraux, The Royal Way, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Random House, 1955), 50.

10 Mounir Bouchenaki, “Opening Address” to the Smithsonian Institution conference, “A Global Assessment of the 1989 Recommendation on the Safeguarding of Traditional Culture and Folklore: Local Empowerment and International Cooperation” Washington, DC, June 27–30, 1999, accessed Dec. 1, 2017, http://www.folklife.si.edu/resources/unesco/bouchenakiaddress.htm.

11 I borrow this triad from Michel de Certeau, “Theories of the Art of Practice,” in The Practice of Everyday Life, vol. 1, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 43.

12 Chiara Bortolotto, “From Objects to Processes: UNESCO's ‘Intangible Cultural Heritage,’” Journal of Museum Ethnography 19 (March 2007): 29.

13 The first three Proclamations (2001, 2003, and 2005) listed ninety forms across seventy countries, including the oral heritage of the Zá;para people of Peru; Georgian Polyphonic singing; the cultural space of Jemaa el-Fna Square in Morocco; Lithuanian cross-crafting and its symbolism; and the Sicilian Opera dei Pupi.

14 See Lyndel Prott, “Individual or Collective Rights for Cultural Heritage in the Information Society?” Museum International 54, no. 4 (December 2002): 7–12; Susan Keitumetse, “UNESCO 2003 Convention on Intangible Heritage: Practical Implications for Heritage Management Approaches in Africa,” South African Archaeological Bulletin 61, no. 184 (December 2006): 166–171; Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Exhibitionary Complexes,” in Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations, ed. Ivan Karp and Corinne Kratz (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 35–46.; and Deborah Kapchan, ed., Cultural Heritage in Transit: Intangible Rights as Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014).

15 “Recommendation on the Safeguarding of Traditional Culture and Folklore,” UNESCO, November 15, 1989, http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=13141&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html.

16 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Exhibitionary Complexes,” 164.

17 Richard McKeon, “A Philosophy for UNESCO,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 8, no. 4 (June 1948): 584.

18 “Article 2—Definitions,” in “Text of the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage,” UNESCO, accessed December 1, 2017, http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/en/convention.

19 Noriko Aikawa, “The UNESCO Recommendation on the Safeguarding of Traditional Culture and Folklore (1989): Actions Undertaken by UNESCO for its Implementation,” in Safeguarding Traditional Cultures: A Global Assessment, ed. Peter Seitel (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, 2001), 14.

20 Kunstwollen has been translated variously from “artistic volition” to “formative will of art” and “will to form.” Aloïs Riegl, “Leading Characteristics of the Late Roman Kunstwollen” (1893), in The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, ed. Donald Preziosi (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 155–161.

21 Samantha Sherkin, “A Historical Study on the Preparation of the 1989 Recommendation on the Safeguarding of Traditional Culture and Folklore,” in Safeguarding Traditional Cultures, 43.

22 See “Universal Copyright Convention of 6 September 1952,” World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), accessed Dec. 1, 2017, http://www.wipo.int/wipolex/en/other_treaties/text.jsp?file_id=172836. This is one of two international copyright conventions; the other, the Berne Convention, has been in force since 1886.

23 Janet Blake, “On Defining the Cultural Heritage,” International and Comparative Law Quarterly 49, no. 1 (January 2000): 65.

24 Sherkin, “Historical Study,” 44. See the WIPO's comparative summary of sui generis laws for the protection of traditional cultural expressions/expressions of folklore, accessed December 1, 2017, http://www.wipo.int/edocs/lexdocs/laws/en/wipo/wipo053en.pdf.

25 J. G. Herder, J. G. Herder on Social and Political Culture, ed. F. M. Barnard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 311–14.

26 E. B. Tylor, “The Science of Culture,” in Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture: The Origins of Culture (1871; New York: Harper, 1958), 16.

27 The founder, Artur Hazelius, described this as “not merely as a museum … but as a place where every object should be in its proper milieu, as it were a living unit.” See “Peasant Art in Sweden, Lapland, and Iceland by Charles Holme,” Art and Progress 2, no. 6 (April 1911): 186.

28 Henry G. Van Leeuwen, The Problem of Certainty in English Thought 1630–1690 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963), 54–56.

29 Wallace R. Lane, “The Transfer of Trademarks and Tradenames,” Law Student's Helper (1911): 232–34; Henry Edwin Tremain, “Franchises or Monopolies: Their Public Ownership and Operation,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 14 (November 1899): 26–42; Thorstein Veblen, “On the Nature of Capital,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 22, no. 4 (August 1908): 517–42; and Horace Lucian Arnold, “The Expense Account,” The Complete Cost-Keeper (Engineering Magazine Press, 1889), 358.

30 “The Minnesota ‘Blue Sky’ Law,” Minnesota Law Review 3 (February 1919): 153.

31 Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects (1968), trans. James Benedict (New York: Verso, 1996), 3.

32 Georg Simmel, “The Sociology of the Meal” (1910), in Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, ed. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (London: Sage Publications, 1997), 131.

33 Pascal Ory, “Gastronomy,” in Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, vol. 2 (1984), ed. Pierre Nora et al., trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 448.

34 Roland Barthes, “Steak-Frites,” in Mythologies (1957), trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012), 85.

35 Alberto Capatti and Massimo Montanari, Italian Cuisine: A Cultural History, trans. Áine O'Healy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 86–87.

36 Susan Pinkard, A Revolution in Taste: The Rise of French Cuisine, 1650–1800 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 10.

37 Ibid., 15.

38 Norbert Elias, The Court Society, ed. Stephen Mennell (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2006), 53.

39 Jean-Louis Flandrin, Arranging the Meal: A History of Table Service in France, trans. Julie E. Johnson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

40 Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste, or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy, trans. and ed. M. F. K. Fisher (New York: Knopf, 2009), 339.

41 Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson traces the development of gastronomy as a “cultural field” through writing and discourse: “A Cultural Field in the Making: Gastronomy in Nineteenth-Century France,” American Journal of Sociology 104, no. 3 (November 1998): 609–10.

42 Ory, “Gastronomy,” 453; and Ferguson, “Cultural Field in the Making,” 611.

43 Brillat-Savarin, Physiology of Taste, 64–65.

44 Ferguson, “Cultural Field in the Making,” 602, 609.

45 Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 72.

46 Lucien Karpik, “Le Guide rouge Michelin,” Sociologie du travail 42 (2000): 369–89.

47 Following the emergence of the restaurant in urban settings of the 1760s, the introduction of the automobile was only one step in a longer history of the meal's dispersal from the domestic interior. See Rebecca L. Spang, The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

48 Daniel Spoerri, An Anecdoted Topography of Chance, trans. Emmett Williams (New York: Something Else Press, Inc., 1966), xvi.

49 Ibid., xv.

50 Herman Lebovics, Mona Lisa's Escort, André Malraux and the Reinvention of French Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 7. For Malraux's role in the Ministry, see Les affaires culturelles au temps d'André Malraux, 1959–1969: journées d'étude des 30 novembre et 1er décembre 1989, ed. Augustin Girard (Paris: La Documentation française, 1996). For the classic text on soft power, see Joseph S. Nye, “Soft Power,” Foreign Policy, no. 80 (1990).

51 Ory, “Gastronomy,” 447.

52 Raymond Kierstead, “Review of Pour une historie de l'alimentation: Recueil de travaux,” in American Historical Review 78, no. 1 (February 1973): 91.

53 Monique Chatenet, “The Inventory and the Protection of the Heritage in France,” Transactions of the Ancient Monuments Society 39 (1995): 43.

54 Simmel traces the emergence of the meal as social form to its aesthetic stylization: “in so far as the meal becomes a sociological matter, it arranges itself in a more aesthetic, stylized and supra-individually regulated form. Now all the regulations concerning eating and drinking emerge, not with regard to the unessential standpoint of food as matter, but specifically with regard to the form of its consumption.” Simmel, “Sociology of the Meal,” 131 (see n. 32).

55 Baudrillard, System of Objects, 1–2 (see n. 31).

56 Brillat-Savarin, Physiology of Taste, 54 (see n. 40).

57 Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 26 (see n. 1).

58 Most prominently, for Kant, taste was a faculty of aesthetic judgment no longer tied to its sensible origins—for beauty to be universal, it could not be based on an individual feeling of pleasure: “The judgment of taste is therefore not a cognitive judgment, hence not a logical one, but is rather aesthetic, by which is understood one whose determining ground cannot be other than subjective.” Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 89.

59 On Claude Perrault, Ordonnance for the Five Kinds of Columns after the Method of the Ancients (1683), see Joseph Rykwert, The First Moderns: The Architects of the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 119.

60 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (1951), trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: New Left Books, 1974), 145.

61 Jukka Gronow, Sociology of Taste (Florence: Routledge, 1997), ix, 13–31.

62 Marco Frascari, “Semiotica ab Edendo, Taste in Architecture,” Journal of Architectural Education 40, no. 1 (Fall 1986): 2–7.

63 For the relationship between food and the performing arts, see Ferguson, “A Cultural Field in the Making,” 600, 610 (see n. 41).

64 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).

65 Terry Eagleton, “The Ideology of the Aesthetic,” Poetics Today 9, no. 2, The Rhetoric of Interpretation and the Interpretation of Rhetoric (1988): 330.

66 Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Random House), 91.

67 For the longer entanglement of agriculture, geography, and empire, see Michael A. Osborne, Nature, the Exotic, and the Science of French Colonialism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).

68 Article L 654-27-1. The rural code extends back to late-eighteenth-century controversies over landed property. While national legislation is pending, France has ratified the UNESCO Convention on Intangible Heritage. See Toshiyuki Konō, ed., The Impact of Uniform Laws on the Protection of Cultural Heritage and the Preservation of Cultural Heritage in the Twenty-First Century (Leiden; Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2010), 412–13.

69 As is attributed probably apocryphally to Louis XIV, “L'Etat, c'est moi.” The definitive study of the body politic and the body natural as embodied in the sovereign is Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957).

70 On nationalism and its technologies of representation, see Homi K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), 3; on “imagined communities,” see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; New York: Verso, 2006); and on “invented traditions,” see Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

71 For the political aesthetics of UNESCO and the design of architectural monuments as instruments of cultural governance, see Lucia Allais, Designs of Destruction: The Making of Monuments in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). This paper is indebted to the provocations of Allais's Monumental Modernity seminar at Princeton University (all misconceptions, of course, are the author's own).

72 Elias, The Court Society, 112. See Stephen Mennell for an expanded discussion of the limits of structuralism to the discourse of food: All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages (1985; Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 13–15.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Phoebe Springstubb

Author Biography

Phoebe Springstubb is a PhD candidate in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art at MIT. Prior to her doctoral studies, as curatorial assistant in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, she worked on exhibitions and publications including Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes and A Japanese Constellation: Toyo Ito, SANAA, and Beyond. She holds an M.Arch. and A.B. from Princeton University.