Social and Cultural Theory question and reading

From: “Foodways,” by Marvin Harris, 1989

I. Cultural Idealist Approaches

In general, cultural idealists explain variations in food preferences and

aversions as a consequence of "culture" (by which they mean the learned emic and

mental components of social life). This strategy has resulted in three kinds of

explanatory propositions: (1) food customs are said to be the consequence of

idiographic-historical continuities that regress to an unknown beginning; (2)

they are the consequence of arbitrary "taste," chance, or whim; (3) they are

the functional symbolic or behavioral correlates or expressions of given systems

of values and beliefs. To the extent that none of these varieties of propositions

invoke selection principles that can account for specific observed variations

in food customs (as well as uniformities) or for the occurrence of the

constraining values and beliefs, they constitute a very weak form of scientific

statement or none at all.

II. Materialist Strategies

Cultural materialist strategies are based on the assumption that

biopsychological, environmental, demographic, technological, and political-

economic factors exert a powerful influence on the foods that can be produced and

consumed by any given human population. However difficult to measure, there are

nutritional needs that must be satisfied and psycho-chemical limits of taste and

toxic tolerances that must be observed. Moreover, we know from the study of

prehistory, history, and ethnography that human diets have undergone a profound

series of changes correlated with shifts in basic modes of production. During the

later portions of the Paleolithic in both hemispheres, for example, meat

appears to have been a focus of much productive effort; in the transitional

phases antecedent to agriculture, a broader spectrum of foods was exploited;

with the development of intensive agriculture, the essential amino acids were

supplied primarily through a combination of grains and legumes; finally, the

spread of industrial agriculture has led to a renewed focus on animal foods. We

also know from the study of prehistory, history, and ethnography that divergences

in these broad patterns are often correlated with particular local conditions

of climate, soil, fauna, and flora. The convergent and divergent trajectories

of human foodways therefore invite nomothetic explanations to no lesser

degree than other aspects of culture or the evolution of the earth and its biofonns.

These preliminary generalizations may appear obvious and hence uninteresting,

but they are the beginning, not the end, of the materialist thrust. It is

reasonable to expect that more complex and interesting generalizations concerning

similarities and differences in food patterns should be discoverable. To

operate on the assumption that they are not discoverable in any given instance

of a preference or aversion seems justified only as a paradigm of last resortthat

is, one to be invoked only after the formulation, testing, and rejection of

plausible nomothetic alternatives.

III. Idealist Approaches: Food As Thought

Starting with Levi-Strauss's (1963:89) observation that "natural species are

chosen not because they are 'good to eat' but because they are 'good to

think,' " it has become intellectually fashionable to give research priority to the

meaning of food and to its mental, ideological, and symbolic functions. Foodways

in this idealist tradition convey messages whose decipherment depends

on knowing little or nothing about biochemical, nutritional, economic, or other

material aspects of comestibles. To the extent that food preferences or aversions

can be explained, their explanation "must be sought not in the nature of

the food items" but rather in the system of signs, the fundamental semantic

structures of a "people's underlying thought pattern" (Soler 1979: 129). The

proposition that food is good for thought before it is good to eat has many

ardent supporters: "Food has little to do with nourishment. We do not eat what

we eat because it is convenient or because it is good for us or because it is

practical or because it tastes good" (Welsch 1981:369).

For Levi-Strauss food is a kind of language whose attributes are "good to

think" because they unconsciously express fundamental themes in the human

psyche. Like languages, cuisines convey messages through a small number of

universal binary contrasts, namely, raw/rotten, raw/cooked, cooked/rotten.

For "structural" analysis, these can be joined to form a "culinary triangle" in

terms of which the "structure" of every culture's foodways can be specified

(Levi-Strauss 1965). On the basis of a food's proximity to the raw, cooked, or

rotten comer of the triangle, one can discern something about its social meaning.

Roasted foods, for example, because of their direct contact with fire, are

farthest away from rotten foods. Therefore, roasts are served to honored

guests rather than boiled meat. The latter is closer to the rotten vertex, since

water intercedes between the food and the flame. No empirical support has

been found for the universal or even singular presence of Levi-Strauss's culinary

triangle (Goody 1982:215-20). But if such a universal "structure" existed,

its significance for understanding preferences, aversions, and foodways in

general would be minimal, since nowhere does Levi-Strauss pose the question

of why the behavioral expressions of cooking, roasting, and boiling involve

particular meats, vegetables, beverages, and so on in different societies.

IV. Food as Meaning: Mary Douglas

For Douglas, as for Levi-Strauss, the main task of anthropologists interested

in foodways is the decipherment of the cryptic messages they contain. To explain

the ancient Israelite swine taboo, one does not need to study the natural history,

archaeology, ecology, and economy of swine production, nor the nutritive

role and value of pork. All the important properties of swine reside in the

mental images of ancient Israelite culture as revealed in the Pentateuch. Douglas's

explanation rests on three such properties: (1) swine were taxonomically

anomalous and hence unclean because even though they have cloven hoofs,

they do not chew the cud like "proper ungulates"; (2) swine, occasional consumers

of carrion, were seen as carnivores, animals whose consumption was

inappropriate for God's people; (3) the taboo on pork was a marker and intensifier

of national identity, separating the Israelites from their neighbors (Douglas

1966, 1972). It is obvious that Douglas's inferences about Israelite mental

life are essentially untestable. (How can we know what the priests of Leviticus

really were thinking about beyond what is preserved in the Bible?) Moreover,

even if the decoding operations are correct, there is no nomothetic output. The

question of why the Israelites got it into their heads that "proper ungulates"

must be cud-chewers is never broached. Given that in many cultures the pig is

venerated rather than abominated, the taxonomic scheme of Leviticus is more

likely to be a consequence of an aversion to swine than a cause of it. This

observation applies as well to the rejection of carnivorous animals. An idiographic

approach to this aversion seems wholly unjustified, since there are

scores of other cultures that avoid carnivores. Indeed, Hayden (1981:398)

notes that "one of the more remarkable features of hunter/gatherer subsistence

is the uniformly low priority of carnivores and raptors as a human food

resource." Finally, as far as Israelite social identity is concerned, pig avoidance

was not an unambiguous symbol. Enemies such as the Babylonians and Phoenicians

also had a swine taboo; among the Egyptians there were Osirian cults

that abominated pigs (Darby, Ghalioungui, and Grivetti 1977: 195); nor is it

likely that pork was consumed in significant quantities by the Israelites' pastoral

neighbors.