Jon Holtzman

Eating Time: Capitalist History and Pastoralist History among Samburu Herders in Northern Kenya

Abstract This article examines food and eating practices as a central domain for understanding the changing politics of everyday life for Samburu pastoralists in northern Kenya. The analysis engages with longstanding debates concerning the historical models applied by western analysts to non-western peoples, as well as contemporary issues concerning the contours of ethnography within the context of global processes. Until recent times Samburu were wealthy livestock keepers, with a central cultural emphasis on a pastoral diet of milk, meat and blood. Patterns of provisioning, eating and food sharing constituted a domain densely packed with core cultural values, and thickly entangled webs of social relations. Over the past several decades, however, there has been a significant decline in the Samburu livestock economy. A diet centrally constituted of livestock products is now impossible for most Samburu, while problematizing those wide-ranging social and cultural domains closely entwined with food and eating. Thus, food and eating practices have become a crucial site where Samburu both experience and shape aspects of change, as well as an important indigenous historical idiom through which they understand their own social transformations. I argue that a model of Samburu history centred upon food effectively situates Samburu within broader political-economic forces without subjugating the agency and the meanings of Samburu actors to those concerns most centrally raised by attention to western notions of modernity and global processes. An approach centred upon the mundane realities of everyday life has a value in forging a unique and meaningful alternative to western models of change.

The World is Dead and Cooking's Killed It: Food and the Gender of Memory in Samburu, Northern Kenya

What is frequently construed as womens special relationship to food has provided an important entry point for gender into studies of social memory. Although such studies offer important insights into the relationship of food, femininity, and memory in the Euro-American contexts upon which they often focus, masculine aspects of food-centered memory have received far less attention, despite their importance in many non-Western settings. Focusing here on Samburu pastoralists in northern Kenya, I examine how a shift from a diet oriented around livestock products to one dominated by purchased agricultural foods forms a potent arena of collective memory, particularly in contrasting present forms of masculinity with historically validated and remembered ones. Most importantly, the new-found emphasis on cooking presented by agricultural foods, “foods of the pot,” disrupts social boundaries that are fundamental to patterns of respect that define the most masculinized of Samburu men, the age-grade of bachelor-warriors. The iconic role these historically validated forms of masculinity hold for the cultural identity of Samburu of all age-gender sectors thus means that collective memory not only becomes oriented around disruptions in food-centered gender relationships, but moreover that Samburu social memory itself becomes in a sense disproportionately masculinized.

On Whale: Conundrums of Culture and Cetaceans as Local Meat

ABSTRACT Likely the worlds most controversial meat, debates concerning whale consumption frequently revolve around discourses regarding the ‘localness’ of food, invoking long-standing anthropological constructs concerning the meaning and significance of ‘culture’. Constituencies at the forefront of opposition to whale consumption are elsewhere among the strongest defenders of diverse food traditions, framing ‘Endangered foods’ as the culinary equivalent of Endangered Species and emblematic of endangered cultures – a reinforcing equivalence that is problematized when food traditions are constituted of meats viewed as morally unfit for consumption. While anti-whaling activists grant ‘indigenous peoples’ modest allowances based on the protections of cultural relativism, Japanese claims to whaling traditions are disparaged as cynical invocations of cultural rights. Thus, this paper examines how in whaling debates varying anthropological conceptions of culture have been exported to the public realm and used to validate, refute or mask claims about cultural rights embedded in the eating of local food.

The weakness of sweetness: masculinity and confectionary in Japan

Abstract This paper explores the complex relationship of sweets to changing gender identities in Japan. Drawing on ethnography and popular culture sources, it examines ways men negotiate their beliefs and activities concerning sweets within a context where being a sweet lover problematizes masculine identities. Sweets in Japan were traditionally regarded as the domain of women and children, while men were expected to prefer spicy foods/alcohol. Changes in food preferences have coincided with erosions in hegemonic forms of Japanese masculinity that emphasized vigor and drive. In popular culture Japan’s economic malaise has been attributed to the replacement of the post-war “carnivorous men” with a generation of “grass-eating boys”, whose interest in sweets is emblematic of their passivity and femininity. In real life, this link is treated rather paradoxically. Informants typically characterize it as a stereotype that no one really believes, or even that the stereotype doesn’t exist, yet their actions and expression of sentiments display having internalized it. In exploring how a discourse can simultaneously be both deeply felt and dismissed as a trifling inanity, I consider the greater attention that ambiguity and uncertainty might be afforded in accounts of food specifically and human life more generally.

Heather Paxson: The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America

Book detailsHeather PaxsonThe Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in AmericaBerkeley, University of California Press; 2012283 pagesISBN: 9780520270183Book detailsHeatherPaxsonThe Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America Berkeley, University of California Press2012283 pagesISBN: 9780520270183