294 Book Reviews / Journal of Chinese Overseas 8 (2012) 291-303 Chinese Food and Foodways in Southeast Asia and Beyond. Edited by Tan Chee-Beng. Singapore: NUS Press, 2011. Pp. 256. Tis detailed multi-authored anthropological volume will be of special interest to read- ers of this journal, devoted as it is to the most salient element of “overseas Chinese” life — its food. It is sometimes said that individuals of Chinese descent will retain their distinctive foodways as the one sure guarantee of a “Chinese” identity, long after they may have ceased to speak any form of Chinese language, practice any distinctively Chinese religion or retain any knowledge of Chinese tradition. Tan Chee-Beng is well placed to serve as editor: apart from his acknowledged interest in the study of food, his own fled research over the decades has taken him to both Southeast Asia and China, and to non-Chinese as well as Chinese populations. Te book is unusually descriptive, concentrating on the food itself. Two theoretical issues do keep coming up, however: the relation of food to identity and to globaliza- tion. Otherwise, there is only passing mention of such other issues as nutrition, cul- tural encodings and commensality patterns. Political-economy and environmental issues make no appearance. Paradoxically, though, this can be seen as a strength, for the book serves as an ethnography-based complement to the several other published studies that do cover those other issues. Te text falls into three parts. Te frst three chapters present overviews of “diasporic” Chinese food in regions not contiguous to China. Te next four chapters move closer to China, by focussing on the ethnography of Chinese food in Southeast Asia, where it has undergone considerable modifcation, while remaining (mostly) in ethnically Chinese hands. Te fnal three chapters present ethnographic accounts of “Southeast Asian Chinese” food as a newly emergent cuisine in the USA, Australia and Hong Kong. Tan Chee-Beng’s editorial “Introduction” includes a useful discussion of the various classifcations of regional Chinese cuisine. While seemingly typological, this helps to focus attention on the far greater variety that exists in China than is represented as “Chinese” food elsewhere. In Chapter 1, Tan introduces the ideas of a distinctive “Southeast Asian Chinese” cuisine. Although this is familiar in practice to millions of people, it has not hitherto been explicitly recognized as a distinctive cuisine on the world stage. Tan sees it as resulting from “the three major cultural processes of cultural reproduction, local inventions and globalization.” In this regard, Southeast Asia cer- tainly serves as key ethnological laboratory — the more so as there are many references in this and the other chapters to the feedback of Southeast Asian developments into the nuclear Chinese area. He also introduces the useful concept of “diasporic Chinese food,” thereby obviating a dull debate about “authenticity.” As with most of the other authors, Tan describes some key dishes in satisfying detail. One could almost employ his account in the kitchen. Nancy Pollock’s chapter ranges widely between the Pacifc, China and Southeast Asia. She shows that the gastronomic link between them long predates contemporary globalization, since the Pacifc was originally settled from East and Southeast Asia several millennia ago. Mobilizing archaeological, linguistic and literary data on the Pacifc Pollock sets out to uncover the common matrix from which the Chinese food- scape began to emerge three or four millennia ago. Despite the changes that necessarily © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012 DOI: 10.1163/17932548-12341241 Also available online – brill.com/jco Journal of Chinese Overseas 8: 294–298 (2012)