© Copyrighted Material © Copyrighted Material www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com Introduction Food and Foodways as Cultural Heritage Michael A. Di Giovine and Ronda L. Brulotte Anthropologists and other scholars sensitive to the world’s diversity of cultural forms and practices are often loath to speak of universalities. However, along with sex and death (and perhaps taxes, as the old adage goes), the production, elaboration, and consumption of food may very well be one of those sets of processes that are common to all human beings. Just as we humans must procreate, and just as our bodies will all eventually pass from this state of living, we all must eat to sustain ourselves. Yet how we eat, and what we eat, and when we eat, and with whom we eat, all uniquely vary from place to place, group to group, time to time—thanks to longstanding geographic, economic, social, and cosmological differences throughout the world. And within these discrete social entities, food binds people together; it is individually consumed, entering into our singular bodies, but often communally grown, processed, and prepared. To feed a village, it takes a village—or, in this age of globalization and industrial food, many villages—and, as such, food is often a primary marker of individual and group identity. Food is therefore extremely affective; its taste on our individual tongues often incites strong emotions, while the communal, commensal experience of such sensations binds people together, not only through space but time as well, as individuals collectively remember past experiences with certain meals and imagine their ancestors having similar experiences. When this occurs, food is transformed into heritage. In the grand scheme of things, heritage is a relatively new term, its origins stemming from the French and British imperial eras to denote the accumulation of wealth or patrimony (patrimoine) of tangible and intangible goods that a society inherits from the past (héritage), preserves in the present, and passes on to the future. These are mediators, linking members of society together through space and time, serving as referential touchstones for a group’s self-identiication—often at the level of the nation (Hall 1999)—and representing the group to outsiders (Di Giovine 2009a). Yet while governments, preservationists, and cultural resource managers may refer to “their” heritage or “the” heritage as if it were discrete set of goods or practices that can be unproblematically claimed or possessed, scholars have argued that heritage is less an identiiable thing than a constructed discourse strategically deployed for political, economic, or ideological goals (see for example Di Giovine 2009a, Handler 1988, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998). What may be one’s heritage may not be another’s, but also what may be claimed as one group’s unique heritage might also be claimed, or contested, by other groups.