The Stinky King: Western Attitudes toward the Durian in Colonial Southeast Asia

Abstract

This article explores attitudes toward the durian, a Southeast Asian fruit that famously arouses emotions as divergent as enticement and revulsion. Starting from the idea that tastes and feelings are historical phenomena, it argues that Western attitudes toward the durian took shape, developed, and varied under specific sociocultural circumstances. It reviews travel narratives and other relevant materials, and describes different and seemingly contradictory phases of the relationship between Westerners and the Southeast Asian fruit. In discussing the historical accounts, it suggests that such changes in attitudes are strictly related to the sociohistorical contexts in which they emerged, namely the cultural shifts involved by what Norbert Elias has described as the civilizing process (in Europe) and the different social structures brought in by colonialism (in Southeast Asia). These shifts and structures impacted on the dynamics of taste formation, and, in turn, investigating such dynamics may shed some light on the social and cultural dimensions of colonialism.

Keywords:

• durian
• colonialism
• Southeast Asia
• civilizing process
• taste
• attitudes

Acknowledgments

Archival research for this study was conducted in 2009–11, during the author’s candidature as an MA student at the Department of Southeast Asian Studies, National University of Singapore (Singapore). I am grateful to my then supervisor, Professor Goh Beng Lan, for her guidance and precious suggestions. I thank the two anonymous reviewers of an earlier (2012) draft of this article; their insightful comments stimulated a substantial revision. If errors remain, they are my own.

Notes

1. For a detailed discussion of the biology and ecology of the durian, see Brown (1997).

2. Materials were consulted in original publications, reprints, or microfilms at the Singapore National Library and the Singapore Archives. Translations from sources in languages other than English are my own.

3. Biologists have proved that food likes and dislikes have an innate component. But as soon as we venture beyond the human “sweet tooth” or the “universal” preference for food rich in protein, experimental results basically fail to explain why humans like certain things and dislike others. The literature on the biological dimension of human diet is reviewed by Armelagos (1987).

4. Acosta is the Hispanicized form of da Costa. “Blancmange” was a dish of medieval origin still much in vogue in modern European cuisines (see Mennell 1996, 49–54). Ingredients varied significantly and admitted chicken, fish, and spices, on a base of milk, sugar, and some thickening agent such as gelatin. It could well be considered an “ancestor” of desserts such as the “rich butter-like custard highly flavored with almonds,” which three centuries later suggested to Sir Alfred Wallace the famous comparison with the durian.

5. According to Alain Corbin (1996, 212–214), who has traced the social role of odors in Modern Europe, until the nineteenth century there was a “loyalty to filth” characterized by “resistance to strategies of deodorization [and] to the policy of distancing man from human excrements.” The idea here is not that Hamilton and people of his time enjoyed eating things that tasted like excrement, but rather that to them such odors were less revolting than they are to us today.

6. For a detailed historical overview, see for instance Webster (1998, 83–208).

7. A casual reading of British-Malayan cookbooks suggests that, although the rulers’ diet stayed firmly British and Victorian in character, several local flavors entered colonial cookery. Curries and sambals, as well as ingredients like tamarind, shrimp paste, and coconut milk feature in recipes (see, for instance, Kinsey 1929. On British colonial cuisine as a space of hybridization, see Leong-Salobir 2011).

8. Concerning this, it is intriguing to mention a line of thought suggested by one of the anonymous reviewers: that the combination of smells and tastes of the durian was more compatible with medieval cuisine. It is certainly possible to pursue this “eminently culinary” argument further; but the question as to why modern culinary taste gradually shifted away from strong, pungent flavors and toward lightness and refinement is one that would resurface.

9. I am grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers for this important insight.

10. Similar dynamics were at work in other twentieth-century colonial contexts (Stoler 1989).

11. The term is Furnivall’s (1956) and describes a society characterized by the juxtaposition of different groups which live separately within the same political unit, interacting in the marketplace but failing to combine in terms of social experience. The result is a sort of caste system that lacks a religious basis.