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PACIFIC ISLAND RESEARCH NETWORK (PIRN)
Feast and Famine: Exploring Relationships with Food in the Pacific
University College London (UCL), 7-8th September 2012
DAY 1 -Friday 7th September 2012
9.30- 10.00 Participants arrive and register
10.00-10.15 INTRODUCTION TO CONFERENCE (Kaori O’Connor and Sarah Byrne).
Session 1: Pacific Foodways Today
10.15-10:45 Samuel Haihuie, Open University, Papua New Guinea and Linus Di'igimrina
Pig-Killing and distribution as an arena of social construction
My indigenous name, Songorohuie, legitimizes my use of the clan land and resources above and below it. All animate and inanimate objects such as the clan’s totemic symbols, space, plants, soil, and land and marine organisms convey social meaning with “spiritual” values connected to land.
When my teacher asked for my name on my first day in school, my father replied ‘Samuel’. Then my teacher asked for my surname. ‘Songorohuie’, my father answered. However, Wantoks who heard him corrected in consistence with their understanding of the Western concept of surname. “That child’s surname is your first name Haihuie”, they told him.
This ‘renaming story’ demonstrates (1) the emergence of simplistic problems from the intersection of diverse ‘traditional’ forms of social organization in PNG societies and Westernized ‘ways of knowing’, (2) variation in basic categories of social practices (in this case, social labeling), and (3) difficulties surfacing from translating a cultural norm to another.
Accounts of indigenous communities in PNG vary. These tend to emphasize spiritual, ancestral, relational, and cosmological connections to their knowledge. While traditional knowledge may be acquired from a “teacher” and improved through experience, it ultimately can be derived through direct communication with the abstract or “spirit world”. Melanesian worldviews, through mythical creation and reciprocal relationship to the natural physical world, contrasts with scientific ways and methodologies of interpreting and defining the lived world. In my society, delineation of the rituals of pig-killing and the intricate division of parts of the pig during feasts illustrates these contrasts.
Pig-cutting and its distribution and serves as a symbolic display of wealth, status, and informal power relations. This ritual is the sole medium by which loyalty and alliances were negotiated, competition was enacted, identity was created and consolidated, and public rituals that link the social and the political including the sacred and the secular were practiced.
10.45-11.15 Kaori O’Connor, University College London
Pineapple and the Invention of ‘Polynesian’ Cuisine
This is an edible historical anthropology of ‘Polynesia’ and Hawaii, seen through changing cuisine and a single non-indigenous fruit. On November 4, 1493, on his second voyage to the New World, Christopher Columbus came ashore on the newly-sighted Caribbean island he had just named Santa Maria de Guadeloupe, and promptly ‘discovered’ the pineapple (ananas comosus). Taken to Europe as royal gifts, pineapples became the fruit of kings, the most luxurious of edibles, celebrated in art and literature, with fortunes spent on growing them in greenhouses. Pineapples were also taken around the globe during the age of exploration, becoming naturalised in tropical zones and colonial empires world-wide. Only one significant locale escaped the early spread of the pineapple – the Hawaiian islands – which remained unknown to the West until 1778. Although Hawaii had the perfect climate for the fruit, the large-scale introduction of pineapples and commercial growing did not begin until the end of the 19th century. Within a few decades, the pineapple had thrown off its South American origins and earlier elite European iconography to become the symbol of ‘Polynesia’ and the defining ingredient of ‘Polynesian’ cuisine. This paper examines the way in which the fledgling Hawaiian tourist industry used the pineapple to promote a romantic vision of the Pacific islands for visitors which also helped to sell Hawaiian canned pineapple around the world, succeeding so well that even now anything called ‘Hawaiian’ is assumed to contain pineapple. At the same time the increasingly multicultural population of Hawaii – many of whom had come from Asia and elsewhere to work in the pineapple plantations – created their own pineapple dishes which became part of ‘tiki’ cuisine and then the fusion cookery for which Hawaii is renowned. The narrative of the pineapple in Hawaii shows what food can contribute to a nuanced understanding of history, identity and popular culture in a dynamic and complex social environment, and also demonstrates the power of invented culinary traditions.
11.15-11.45 – COFFEE BREAK
11.45-12.15 Andy Mills, University of East Anglia
Slow Manava: The Metaphysical Ins & Outs of Food Culture in Tonga
In 18th and early 19th Century Tonga, eating, digestion, defecationand the control offood had a strong relationship with thekey cultural concepts ofmana,tapuand chieflyness ('eiki). This paper will explore the nature of that relationship by examining ethnohistorical descriptions of commensality,ritual practices, food prohibitions, fishing and farming practices, and the circulation of foodstuffs. This broadly cast net will allow us to haul in a novelreconstruction of pre- Christian embodiment and metaphysics in Tongathat elicitsthecohesive rationality underlyinga disparate and seemingly unconnected set of cultural phenomena. It also highlights some of the cultural preconditions of Tongan food culture that collided catastrophically with the Western culture of fast food and processed carbohydrates during the 20thCentury, to make Tonga the most obese nation on earth.
12.15-12.45: DISCUSSION
12.45-2.00: LUNCH
Session 2: Food as Technology and Process
2.00-2.30 Ludovic Coupaye, University College London
Eating Sociology? Tubers as paradigms among the Abelam of Papua New Guinea (and beyond ?)
This paper elaborates on the position of tubers agriculture in PNG and Melanesia systems of thought. Using the case of the Abelam of the East Sepik Province, that are displayed during specific ceremonies, I will investigate whether the trans-Melanesian custom of displaying cultivated tubers suggests that this particular type of plant is used by indigenous communities to think through social life – and social relations. But instead of being simply a form of local hermeneutics, I suggest that it is the very properties of the plant (as non-human entity and as food), made visible through processes of cultivation, that are considered as particularly relevant for thinking, discussing and showing what sociality is about. Still based on hypotheses at this stage, the paper aims to outline future avenues for field research.
2.30-3.00 Yoko Nojima, International Research Centre for Japanese Studies, Kyoto
Technological styles of cooking and feast food: the case of Northern Vanuatu
While cooking technologies are viewed as an extension of subsistence activities reflecting ecological background, they are complex cultural processes. Following the anthropology of technology framework, the diversity of cooking practices in northern Vanuatu is explored by focusing on two aspects: 1) stone oven cooking strategies, and 2) the feast food known as laplap and nalot, or “pudding”-like dishes processed by grating or pounding crops. These aspects, typifying culinary practices in the Pacific, have been developed in many sophisticated ways as basic tools for processing foods of the people living on the island. Northern Vanuatu cases displaying the diversity of cooking styles enables detailed examinations of how cooking designs and technological styles are organized. On the one hand, cooking styles including the cooking device, operation, and varieties of dishes reflect economic and social importance of certain crop species. On the other, specific techniques are chosen more for their sociocultural values rather than practicality or efficiency, and such cultural needs conversely reinforce the selection and use of particular varieties of food. In northern Vanuatu where local societies are small and largely tribal, cooking styles designating cultural identity functions as an effective means of maintaining and reproducing social relations within and between groups.
3.00-3.30 Marie Durand, University of East Anglia
Eating for the House: Technical processes of food production, social efficacy and gender in the context of house building on Mere Lava, Vanuatu (TBC)
In Vanuatu, as elsewhere in the Pacific, food production, food sharing and distribution pervades people's lives in an important way. From the cradle to the grave, and from the garden to the plate, food appears as an efficacious item through which people appraise and negotiate their social, spatial and temporal environment. The characteristics of food, as items that possess the abilities to cross the permeable boundaries of bodies, and eventually contribute to their transformations, have indeed been largely studied in the Pacific. The close connection between food and gender has notably been examined through the lens of substance, fertility, gender construction and hierarchical domination of men over women. Similarly, houses have been acknowledged as crucial loci for the constitution of persons and the negotiation of gendered relationships.
This paper, based on data gathered in 2010-2011 on the island of Mere Lava in the northern part of the Vanuatu archipelago, will draw upon an overview of the technical operations leading to the production, distribution and consumption of food in the context of kitchen houses. As such, it aims to highlight in a processual way how food as material culture interacts with, and at the same time constitutes, gendered persons and spaces such as houses, which on Mere Lava appear as privileged constructions in terms of social efficacy and materialization of conceptual ideas linked to space and time.
3.30-4.00 COFFEE BREAK
4:00- 4:30 Maëlle Calandra, EHESS-CREDO
Nourishing gardensfacing catastrophe
On Tanna Island, Vanuatu (in Lamlu, a central bush village), a “disaster” is measured and defined only according to the damage caused to the crops. Subsistence horticulture has always been central to this community, and the gardens where this is practiced are crucial for the local people. Their balance however can be disrupted, or altogether wiped out, by frequent cyclical and life-threatening events (cyclones, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, acid rains, etc.), which can jeopardize farming. To ensure prosperity and fertility within the gardens, agricultural magicians, called Tapunis, act in very specific ways and at very specific times under the authority of customary hierarchy (Descola 1986; Godelier 1972; Malinowski 1965). In order to protect these places, the Tapunis supervise the tubers from germination to harvest; they play a major role, and without their assistance, nothing would grow. When carried out efficiently, ceremonies such as Niel or Toka are held: large quantities of food are exchanged, and many pigs are slaughtered – a reminder of the tribal wars during which alliances between clans were formed and maintained. These ceremonies also protect the gardens from black magic. In this paper I will present and analyse these operational sequences: practical agricultural, exchanges and magic.
4.30-5:00 DISCUSSION
5:00-8.00 DRINKS AND LUAU PARTY
DAY 2 SATURDAY 8TH SEPTEMBER 2012
SESSION 3: LANDSCAPES OF FEASTING
9.30- 10.00 Jim Specht, Australian Museum, Sydney; Carol Lentfer, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Peter Matthews, The National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, Japan.
Feasting in a nutshell? Reflections of past social practices in Island Melanesia
Within the present-day western Pacific Islands, feast can be small affairs or large gatherings that celebrate, among other things, the various stages of life and death. To date, however, they have received almost no attention by archaeologists, whose efforts have largely aimed to define the frameworks of local and regional prehistories. Swadling (2004; Swadling and Hide 2005) has speculated on the role of stone bowls in the production of ceremonial taro puddings, and Torrence (2011) links special obsidian artefact forms with status-achieving practices in the middle and late Holocene. Neither explicitly addresses the issue of feasting and its history. We offer, therefore, an exploratory approach to the archaeology of feasting in the Papua New Guinea-Solomon Islands region. We draw upon archaeological, archaeobotanical and ethnographic data on the use of edible nuts, the macro-remains of which survive well in many archaeological contexts compared to the foods usually associated with feasting. Our preliminary conclusions suggest that feasting may have contributed to important developments in the development and distribution of certain nut-bearing trees, possibly from the middle Holocene onwards.
10.00-10.30 Sue Hamilton, University College London
Chasing chickens: feasting, food ritual and food deprivation on prehistoric and proto-historic Rapa Nui (Easter Island)
There has been little consideration of the social context of Rapa Nui’s prehistoric and proto-historic food traditions. Monumental stone construction by the early inhabitants of Rapa Nui, including statue production, centred on the period AD 1200-1600 and the foodstuffs that fuelled these activities included fish – possibly an early food under elite control, rats, chickens, bird eggs and tubers. Rectangular, flat-topped stone-build structures, named hare moa, are numerous monuments on the island. Those with low, side openings have been interpreted as protected chicken coops or tuber stores and those without entrances have been interpreted as tombs. While the use of hare moa may have changed through time, they contribute to the idea that chicken husbandry had an elevated status by the end of the statue building period and subsequently. Chickens were brought to Rapa Nui, accompanied by the Polynesian rat, in the canoes of the original Polynesian colonisers. Rapa Nui’s very limited biodiversity and great isolation made its food resources particularly vulnerable to environmental and socio-economic changes. With the loss of trees and therefore wood for the canoes that allowed access to sea resources, fish bones dwindle in the archaeological record and chicken bones became increasingly recurrent. In the context of Rapa Nui’s lack of large invertebrate fauna – introduced and native, intensified poultry husbandry is suggested to have become analogous to Polynesian pig-raising in its ultimate socio-economic and ritual connotations. Ethnographically, the ideological importance of the chicken in Rapa Nui is evident in the use of chicken feathers in costumes - particularly the strategic use of black and red cockerel feathers, the occasional depiction of cockerels in petroglyphs, the ceremonial role of the umu- (hot stone and earth oven) cooked chicken, and the importance of the smell of cooking chicken to placate the spirits. This paper explores the socio-economic and symbolic role of the chicken in feasting, food ritual and food crisis in later prehistoric and protohistoric Rapa Nui.
10:30-11.00 COFFEE BREAK
11.00-11.30 Jocelyne Dudding, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge
Hereanee, Whatta; Duludulumata, Nevsem, Haraki Stages, et al- Is there a Pacific Connection to Feasting Platforms?
John Webber drew a hereanee in January 1778 when he visited Atooi in the Sandwich Islands during Cook’s third Pacific voyage. James Cook then compares this to the Whatta he had seen previously in Otaheite. In 1817 William Mariner writes of attending a ceremony in Tonga to annul eight months of taboo, for which four columns reaching the height of 50-60 ft high were filled with yams and topped off by a cold baked pig. In 1898, Alfred Cort Haddon photographed a Kaketut on Mer, Torres Strait, in which food was piled high in three bamboo crates. Elsdon Best in 1916 provides construction details of Maori Haraki stages that were built for ceremonial feasts for up to six thousand guests. In 1980 a duludulumata was constructed in Rewa, Fiji, but collapsed under high winds. And in 2003, elders of Erromango made a plea for a workshop to gather information so that the nevsem could be revived.