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ABSTRACT
Food avoidance is a negotiated and changeable compromise among religious prescriptions, social pressures, and personal predilections. Just as the formal rules reflect the structures of social and political authority, moreover, the culturally intimate space of personal practice may reflect contextual changes leading to sometimes agonized re-assessments of what is acceptable; it may also be a surer guide to insiderhood than the rules themselves. Studying food avoidances as a dynamic space of agency through reinterpretation and transgression may also illuminate the lability of political identities, on which concerns over the significance, appropriateness, and efficacy of boycotts – themselves often involving contestations over food – shed particularly revealing light.
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Notes
1. On the models-for/models-of distinction in anthropology, see Geertz (Citation1973, 92–93).
2. This is analogous to the distinction I make between reality and realism, and between science and scientism (Herzfeld Citation2018). Sutton (Citation2017) has persuasively argued that cooking is itself a form of theory-making.
3. I take the term “geo-body” from Winichakul’s (Citation1994) justly famed analysis of the emergence of the Thai ethnonational state.
4. On methodological nationalism, see Wimmer and Schiller (Citation2002).
5. For a contemporary description and explanation, see Urquhart (Citation1857).
6. For a useful summary of variations in (and debates about) Islamic attitudes to alcohol across time, geography, and doctrinal difference, see Michalak and Trocki (Citation2006).
7. See https://www.france24.com/en/20190703-focus-turkey-raki-wine-alcohol-taxes-bars-restrictions-akp-islamist-conservative-erdogan (accessed May 24, 2020).
8. See, e.g., http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20180604-has-rome-declared-an-artichoke-war (accessed May 24, 2020).
9. While meat has traditionally been the “masculine” food in much of Western society, the adoption of a dish – hummus – associated with the conquered Arabs by settler colonists has, Hirsch (Citation2016, 338, 351–53) suggests, been particularly identified with masculinity. In the similarly meat-oriented masculinity of the Cretan village where I have worked intermittently since 1974 (see now Herzfeld Citation2021, chapter 4), the shift to male pride in green garden produce may also, as with Israeli hummus, suggest calibration with new ecological sensibilities. Such shifts also illustrate the main point of this article: the lability of attitudes presented as inflexible. When I first worked in the village, men were much more adamant that real men did not consume vegetables in public (Herzfeld Citation1985, 134, 225–26).
10. I am grateful to Bruce Kapferer for his permission to mention this event (e-mail of May 27, 2020).
11. The quoted materials (in which I have removed personal identifiers) come from a diary (December 24, 1986) kept by Cornelia Mayer Herzfeld when we were doing fieldwork in Rethemnos, Crete in 1986–87, and are reproduced here with her permission.
12. As a village-born woman, the mother would feel subject to greater pressure to conform to doctrinal practice than either her male family members or her daughter (a well-educated urban professional). Self-deprivation implicitly allows for a greater latitude of interpretation than would be possible with a genuine fast (i.e., a period of total abstention from all food).
13. I wish to make this absolutely clear, to counteract the risk of completely mendacious insinuations to the contrary.
14. On spatial cleansing, see Herzfeld (Citation2006).
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Michael Herzfeld
Michael Herzfeld is a social anthropologist with extensive field experience in Greece Italy and Thailand. Author of twelve books, he is a former editor of American Ethnologist and served as the first Director of the Thai Studies Program at Harvard University's Asia Center. In 2021, he was made an honorary citizen of Greece.