Gastro-Politics in Hindu South Asia

Arjun Appadurai

American Ethnologist, Vol. 8, No. 3, Symbolism and Cognition. (Aug., 1981), pp. 494-511.

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gastro=politics in Hindu South Asia

ARJUN APPADURAI-University of Pennsylvania

When human beings convert some part of their environment into food, they create a

peculiarly powerful semiotic device. In its tangible and material forms, food presupposes

and reifies technological arrangements, relations of production and exchange, conditions

of field and market, and realities of plenty and want. I t i s therefore a highly condensed

social fact. I t i s also, at least in many human societies, a marvelously plastic kind of collec-

tive representation. Even the simplest human cuisines, as LBvi-Strauss (1966) has suggested,

encode subtle cosmological propositions. With the elaboration of cuisine and its socio-

economic context, the capacity of food to bear social messages is increased. As many an-

thropologists have shown, food, in its varied guises, contexts, and functions, can signal rank

and rivalry, solidarity and community, identity or exclusion, and intimacy or distance (Firth

1973; Geertz 1960; Ortner 1978; Strathern 1973; Young 1971). This semiotic virtuosity has

two general sources. One i s the fact that, unlike houses, pots, masks, or clothing, food is a

constant need but a perishable good. The daily pressure to cook food (combined with the

never-ending pressure to produce or acquire it) makes it well suited to bear the load of

everyday social discourse. The second fundamental fact about food, although this i s much

less well understood, i s its capacity to mobilize strong emotions. This property, no doubt,

has roots in the powerful association, in the human life cycle, between the positive memory

of nurture and the equally powerful negative experiences (such as weaning) of early human

life (Angyal 1941; Rozin and Fallon 1980, in press). It is these facts that account for the im-

portant affective role played in systems of food classification by foods that are abhorred,

avoided, or feared.

Exploration of these issues by anthropologists has generally taken one of two directions:

either, following the lead of Richards (1932, 1939) and Malinowski (19651, anthropologists

have sought to locate the role of food in social organization; or, following the later lead of

LBvi-Strauss (1966), they have sought to understand food as a cultural system, a system of

The general semiotic properties of food take particularly intense forms in the context of gastrc~politics- where food is the medium, and sometimes the message, of conflict. In South Asia, where beliefs about food encode a complex set of social and moral propositions, food serves two diametrical- ly opposed semiotic functions: i t can either homogenize the actors who transact in it, or i t can serve to heterogenize them. In the Tamil Brahmin community of South India, this underlying tension takes three particular forms in the arenas of the household, the marriage feast, and the temple. [food, symbolism, semiotics, politics, South India]

Copyright O 1981 by the American Ethnological Society 0094-0496/81/030494-18$2.30/1

494 amerlcan ethnologist

symbols, categories, and meanings. An important set of related works in the 1960s sought

to bridge these approaches, particularly in relation to problems of food avoidance and

animal classification (Douglas 1966; Leach 1964; Bulmer 1967; Tambiah 1969). My own

analysis fits best with this last approach, which I would describe as one that looks at food

as part of the semiotic system in a particular social context. The operative questions for this

approach would be: What do particular actions involving food (and particular foods)

"say"? To whom? In what context? With what immediate social consequences? To what

structural end? By gastro-politics I mean conflict or competition over specific cultural or economic

resources as it emerges in social transactions around food. In this sense, gastro-politics is a

common feature of many cultures. But my principal concern in this essay i s ethnographic,

and I shall largely confine myself to a discussion of this phenomenon in South Asia. I raise

some points of comparative interest in the conclusion.

the South Aslan context

In contemporary South Asian society, even a casual visitor can only be impressed by the

importance of food in daily life and daily discourse. Foods are regarded as important media

of contact between human beings; in a society that rests on the regulation of such contact,

food i s a focus of much taxonomic and moral thought. Cuisine is highly developed and

highly differentiated, and even modest peasant diets have some variety. Feasting and

fasting have powerful associations with generosity and asceticism. Food avoidances, for

different persons in different contexts, are developed to a remarkably high degree and can

signal caste or sect affiliation, life-cycle stages, gender distinctions, and aspirations toward

higher status. Finally, the linguistic usages surrounding food themselves encode some of

these distinctions (Ramanujan 1968). In such a highly particularistic society, this is no

casual burden for any semiotic device. What accounts for the variety and intensity of com-

municative tasks performed by food in South Asia?

The first factor which underlies the semiotic virtuosity of food in South Asia, and partly

explains its particular brand of gastro-politics, may be termed ecohistorical. By and large,

South Asia has been for almost two thousand years a highly stratified, sedentary agricul-

tural economy. As such, agrarian surpluses are extracted in conditions of considerable

climatic uncertainty, technological simplicity, and unequal access to agrarian resources.

I t i s therefore no surprise that in South Asia, as in many historical peasant societies, many

important ideas concerning sharing, redistribution, and power are expressed in the idiom of

food. The particular cultural form that these conditions take in South Asia can best be seen

in the jajrnani system. Until recent changes in the economy (having to do with the increas-

ing absorption of rural areas into urban markets, increased monetization, and more

occupational alternatives outside the rural sector), this system was the principal mode by

which the moral distinctions of caste were articulated with the division of labor in the

political economy of rural South Asia. In this arrangement, a series of ritual transactions

bound agricultural clients and specialists to their wealthy clients in a relatively closed, non-

monetary, reciprocal economic system. The dominant symbol of this system was the "grain

heap," fixed shares in it being the metonymic and metaphorical indices of a variety of rela-

tionships of patron with agricultural client. In this agrarian system, shares in the agrarian product (food-grain especially) were the dominant vehicle for indicating simultaneously

the relationship of subordination and domination between patrons and clients, as well as

the bonds of cooperation and solidarity between them. At the same time, and at another

level, the capacity of the economy to generate surpluses has, as in other societies, provided

gastro-politics In India 495

the basis for the elaboration of urban centers, "great traditions," religious specialists,

ceremonial elaboration, and sumptuary logics.

These latter developments, in turn, are among the necessary conditions for that elabora-

tion of food and its consumption which we label cuisine. But South Asian cuisine is not

simply a function of technical complexity, literacy, taxonomic elaboration, the logic of the

recipe, and the social innovation of table manners and gastronomic propriety. In addition,

South Asian civilization has invested perhaps more than any other in imbuing food with

moral and cosmological meanings-and this i s the second factor which must be briefly re-

viewed before gastro-politics in this environment can be properly understood.

The density, scope, and taxonomic complexity of Hindu symbolic thought in regard to

food i s difficult to capture in a brief space. Khare (1976b) has placed us in his debt by a

series of essays which outline the implications of this conceptual system and its cultural

logic. Classical Hindu thought, which as Khare has shown underlies contemporary gastro-

nomic practice, contains a series of important assumptions about food and its place in the

cosmos. In a very real sense, in Hindu thought, food, in its physical and moral forms, is the

cosmos. I t i s thought to be the fundamental link between men and gods. Men and gods are

coproducers of food, the one by his technology and labor (the necessary conditions) and

the other by providing rainfall and an auspicious ecological situation (the sufficient condi-

tions). Men assure this cooperation by feeding the gods and eating their leftovers

(prasadam). Thus, at the most abstract level, the production and consumption of food are

part of a single cycle of transactions with the gods. Under this large rubric fall a host of

specific ideas about kinds of food ("raw" and "cooked"); their appropriateness for a variety of contexts (such as death and marriage); the transactional logic of giving and receiving in

establishing a hierarchy among sentient beings; the ranking of various kinds of foods ac-

cording to the relationship between the food and its user or eater or cook; and the inherent

thrust of food towards distribution-hence the concern with the regulation of food

transfer, exchange, transaction, and circulation (Khare 1976b:120). Even this highly simpli-

f ied summary should suggest the elaborateness of the indigenous symbolic schematization

of food as a bearer of moral properties, cosmic meanings, and social consequences.

The link of this larger scheme of meanings to food transactions has been explored care-

ful ly by Marriott (1968,1976,1978) in a series of essays over an 11-year period. His most re-

cent arguments are directly relevant to a part of the argument of this essay. Marriott (1978)

has recently proposed that Hindu thought reverses the general assumption of Western

social science that intimacy correlates inversely with rank. He suggests that, in Hindu

thought, intimacy and rank are positively correlated, so that the more unequal the trans-

acting dyad the more likely their food transactions are to be intimate (as measured by the

nature of the foods shared and the context of sharing). This Hindu inversion of the reigning assumption of Western social science in regard to intimacy and rank makes sense, accord-

ing to Marriott, since Hindu social thought does not rest on the conception of the "individ-

ual" as a bounded, indivisible, and stable unit, but rather sees the individual as being com-

posed of smaller units of thought and substance which are unstable, permeable, and

themselves rankable. Given the equally atomized and differentiated conception of food substances in Hindu thought, it follows that intimate food exchanges should sustain diver- sities in rank, rather than abolish them.

This may well be the case. Nevertheless, I shall argue that food in South Asia can serve

two diametrically opposed semiotic functions. It can serve to indicate and construct social relations characterized by equality, intimacy, or solidarity; or, i t can serve to sustain rela-

tions characterized by rank, distance, or segmentation. Any specific semiotic outcome is a matter of the particular food substance, the actors involved in the transaction, and the con-

text and audience of their transaction. Marriott may well be right that when the cultural

496 amerlcan ethnologist

system is functioning optimally, food i s the semiotic instrument of Hindu ideas of rank and

distance. But my concern is with situations when conflict erupts over food transactions.

Such occasions, which comprise gastro-politics, arise precisely when food is manipulated

to carry messages between actors who, though they may share the fundamental meanings

of the system (the paradigmatic level), are engaged in a struggleover the particular syntag-

matic chain of food events in which they are involved.

The following ethnographic analysis of gastro-politics i s based on information about the

Tamil Brahmin community of South India, with whom I have lived and worked. I shall look at three arenas-the household, the marriage feast, and the temple-and attempt, finally,

to explain what unites them in regard to the role of food and what the differences between

them are about.

gastro-polltlcs In the household

Like the North Indian Brahmin household context recently described in detail by Khare

(1976a) the Tamil Brahmin household revolves around the social and symbolic organization

of the hearth. What i s presented here focuses less on the food cycle of the Tamil Brahmin

household, which i s remarkably similar to the North Indian variant, and more on those rules

and contexts around which conflict i s likely to be expressed. However, I am not here con-

cerned with the politics of the household in general, a topic which has recently been

analyzed with reference to rural Bengal (Davis 1976).

Tamil Brahmin households are bulwarks of culinary orthodoxy. They are generally

scrupulously vegetarian. Especially in the urban context, of which I have the greatest

firsthand experience, there are three important daily meals. An early lunch, consisting of

rice, lentils, a vegetable, yogurt, and perhaps a pickle; a high tea, generally consisting of

some freshly prepared savory and coffee; and dinner, the most elaborate meal, which con-

sists often of two kinds of lentil preparations, at least one vegetable dish, a variety of ac-

companying condiments, yogurt, and, of course, the staple, rice. This basic structure can be

embellished by the addition of a separate early morning breakfast or varied by inverting the

importance of lunch and dinner. This daily food cycle i s embedded in a complex ritual

calendar of festivals and ceremonies in which the different contexts of worship are marked

by a variety of special ceremonial meals. The hearth i s under the direct control of the

women of the household, who are under the supervision of the senior female or the senior

daughter-in-law. Except in a relatively small number of mobile, urban families, food is

served in the kitchen, often in direct view of the cooking area. Since this implies very direct

visual and proxemic access to the most sacred area of the house, food may be served in a

more public space in the house when "guests" are present. This, as we shall see, i s a flexible

criterion since who is defined as a "guest," even within the world of kinsmen, is in itself a

gastro-political decision.

In keeping with Marriott's (1978) argument concerning the direct (not inverse) correlation

between intimacy and rank, the handling of food within the household i s circumscribed by

a basic set of widely shared principles. I t i s important to grasp these principles before the

politics of food in the household can be properly understood. These rules, though closely interlinked, can be distinguished as follows.

1. Social precedence in the food cycle i s based on age and sex grading with primacy

generally going to the older and male members of the hearth group. Cooking is the domain

of the women and therefore indicates their general subordination to the men. This i s a generalized extension of the basic idea that cooking and sexual intercourse are appropriate

gastro-politics in India 497

and symbolically interconnected services performed by a wife for a husband. Nevertheless,

hierarchy between women i s expressed in the management of the cooking process, which i s organized on principles of seniority and affinity among the women. Domestic food trans-

actions express the superiority of men largely through their priority in being served food,

the positions which they physically occupy, and their disengagement from the cooking pro-

cess. These syntactic properties are also used to establish and define hierarchies among

males in the household.

2. The husband's relatives always rank higher and are hence accorded precedence in the

serving and eating of food. Conversely, the wife's relatives are treated as somewhat lower

in rank under ceremonial circumstances but as near equals under ordinary circumstances.

The general rule here i s that while the agnatic group i s the dominant force in the

household, affines are nevertheless to be treated with care and formality. This blurring of

the distinction between agnates and affines, which contrasts sharply with the North, i s no

doubt due to the propensity towards close marriages (often based on the cross-cousin

preference) that characterizes the South, and is, as we shall see, one of the sources of

gastro-politics. Age and sex criteria turther refine the application of this principle. 3. The patrikin of the male head of the household are generally treated with greater

gastronomic deference than are his matrikin. The same principle applies to his wife's

kinsmen, although here, as well, the line between agnates and affines might be blurred,

with similar ambiguous consequences.

4. Consanguines, both lineal and collateral, are also generally ranked in food transac-

tions according to the criteria of age, sex, and kinship distance.

5 . All nonresident kinsmen of the core couple, as well as all nonagnates, whether resident

or nonresident, walk a fine line between "inside" and "outside," kinsman and guest, in

terms of food etiquette. This fact obviously has important ramifications for the concrete

syntactic outcomes of food events.

6. Children of both sexes, whether resident or nonresident, stand to some degree outside

the arena in which the above rules are systematically applied. They are often fed before

anyone else. Their transgression of gastronomic proprieties i s often indulged. Their culinary

whims are given as much play as possible within the broad constraints of the household

budget and the boundaries of ritual propriety. However, between the ages of five and ten, a

sharp distinction begins to be made between male and female children. While the male

children are encouraged to continue to demand deference in culinary etiquette, female

children are increasingly socialized into the subordinate, service role that they must learn

to occupy as future daughters-in-law. In this regard, we might say that children in their early

years, whether male or female, are treated by analogy with deities: they often eat first, their

"leavings," at least for their mothers, are not considered degraded (echchal) but rather

transvalued brasadam), and their tastes, like those of the divinities, are paid serious atten-

tion. But as they grow up and become decisively "human," male children are taught to

behave like husbands and their female counterparts are encouraged to become little

women (or, more precisely, little wives).

Gastro-politics, in this environment, can arise for a variety of reasons, but there are three

types of situations that are likely to engender conflict: when one or more of the relevant

principles i s inherently ambiguous; when two of the principles are in apparent contradic-

tion in a particular context; and when, though the principles are clearly grasped, incum-

bents of key roles are in conflict over actual gastronomic compliance with the expectations

associated with these roles. I shall now place these general sources of gastro-politics in the

concrete ethnographic context and explicate them sequentially. Let us first consider the type of situation in which a given principle is inherently am-

biguous and therefore can generate conflict in a variety of circumstances. Gne example i s

498 amerlcan ethnologist

the not infrequent situation (given the tendency towards actual cross-cousin marriage in ad-

dition to classificatory cross-cousin marriage) when a man's daughter marries his wife's

brother's son. In this situation, two males who were already brothers-in-law now become af-

fines (sambandi) of another sort. The previous relationship dictates that the brother-in-law

(being on the wife's side) be treated as a subordinate kinsman. But the new relationship be-

tween these two males dictates a subtle shift in rank because of the superiority of wife-

takers over wife-givers. In a culinary context, this can lead to ambiguity, which i s some-

times reflected in what i s perceived by the guest as the inappropriate reification of a

previous kinship status, or by the host as an upstart attempt to insist on a new mode of

treatment based on the new relationship. Even the continued intimacy between the wife

and her brother is not always adequate to defuse such a situation.

A second sort of ambiguity can arise when the distinction between kinsman and guest i s blurred. Given the basic preference, in culinary precedence, for agnates over affines, for

patrikin over matrikin, certain kinds of formality are always assumed. Thus, any relative of

the wife i s likely to be treated somewhat more casually than any relative of the husband.

But in many situations, a "guest" who is, from the kinship point of view, a casual and in-

timate participant in the culinary arrangements of the household can become a demanding

guest. This could be the result of a past history of tension, a perceived affront, or a contex-

tual fact, such as the preferred treatment of another guest who i s younger and less intimate

but who is a representative of an important agnatic segment.

This kind of situation can be further exacerbated when a kinsman becomes a long-term

guest. Often this i s based on the economic needs of the visitor. Such a "poor cousin" has

one of two choices: either he can concede the intrinsic subordination of his status, or he

can attempt to deny economic realities and assert claims based on other legitimate prin-

ciples of etiquette. This latter option can place the host and hostess in the awkward situa-

tion of having to socialize the "guest" in his subordinate status. Castro-political messages

are often the favored mode for such socialization. If the kinsman who i s a long-term and

economically dependent "guest" i s a woman, the choices are starker still. She can either

put up with the overdetermined negative status of being a dependent, but peripheral,

female, or she can slide into the role of "servant," which is also encoded largely in gastro-

political terms, such as the receipt of leftovers and other predicaments with which I deal below.

In a joint family situation, where there is more than one conjugal pair in the household

and where there is more than one hearth, children can become the pawns in an intrinsically

ambiguous situation. Since children do not generally understand the delicate but important

dividing lines between the various hearths and the complex budgetary segmentation they

represent, they frequently make claims on hearths to which they do not primarily belong.

These claims often elicit gastro-political responses. Thus, a daughter-in-law may reluctantly

be forced to feed her nephew at her own hearth, although she would not strictly be obliged

to do so. But she may express her dissatisfaction by explicitly giving her own child some

special food and publicly withholding i t from the unwanted child. The specifics of such en-

counters depend on a host of contingent facts about the particular relations, at a given

point in time, between all the adults, male and female, in the joint household.

When a joint household continues to share a common hearth, and relations between the brothers and their wives begin to deteriorate, the women frequently begin to hoard a varie-

ty of special foods, snacks, milk, and ghee in their private larders, away from the common stock. This private larder is for them alone and for their children. A very simple test of

whether a joint family is in this phase of affairs is whether the meal that is produced for a

guest, from the common larder and shared kitchen, has been stripped down to the bare

gastro-polltlcs In lndla 499

essentials. Of course, i t is quite important whose guest is being entertained, for even a

slender common meal can be embroidered or pared down.

The second type of situation i s one where two principles of the system in a given situa-

tion are perceived to be in conflict. These situations are easy to imagine where there i s a

complex web of priorities based on age, sex, and nature of kinship relationships: agnate or

affine; patrikin or matrikin; resident versus nonresident; honored guest versus poor cousin.

Thus, when a meal i s served, should priority be given to the 30-year-old younger brother of

the head of the household or to the 70-year-old maternal aunt of the female head of the

house? There is no clear answer. The final decision depends on the judgment of the host

and hostess as to whose feelings are more likely to be hurt and whose annoyance is the

easier lived with. In this case, the principle of age is in conflict with the preference for

agnates over affines and the priority of males over females. Or, consider when such choices

have to be made between matrikinsmen of the husband and patrikinsmen of the wife. This

situation creates a direct collision between the preference for husband's relatives over

wife's relatives and the general preference for patrikinsmen of either sort over matrikins-

men. The host and hostess in such situations will also have to weigh a variety of factors

before making a decision, including past gastro-political or economic transactions,' dif-

ferentials in wealth and public status between the two kinds of guests, and personal bonds

of affection (which can be stretched into concessions of temporary subordination). In any

case, food is the critical context in which such decisions, whether deliberate or impulsive,

are played out. It i s to culinary syntax that the receivers look for an index of their relative

standing. The last type of general problem that i s likely to generate gastro-political skirmishes i s

when incumbents of key roles are in conflict over either the general expectations

associated with these roles or specifically with the gastronomic implications of these roles.

The classic example of this species of gastro-politics i s the relationship between mother-in-

law and daughter-in-law, a relationship which is conflict-ridden elsewhere in South Asia as

well as in many other societies. In traditional Tamil Brahmin society, not only i s the new

bride expected to play a meek, subordinate, and labor-intensive role in her husband's

house, but she i s specifically the instrument of her mother-in-law's desires, especially in the

culinary domain. I t i s in the culinary context that she i s expected to master the specific

ritual and aesthetic codes that govern her new household. But in the course of her life cy-

cle, as she gains seniority and her mother-in-law begins to relinquish more and more active

control of the hearth, the balance of power shifts. Food events, even at the most harmo-

nious of times, register such shifts. While in her apprentice phase, the daughter-in-law may

be underfed, the last to eat, and often must eat alone, she may eventually end up eating

well and eating in the company of her mother-in-law after the men have been fed. This shift

i s rarely smooth, however, especially now that brides in Tamil Brahmin households increas-

ingly bring "modern" conceptions to bear on their marital alliances. Disharmony, in such

contexts, especially since it i s between women who are involved in every phase of the food

cycle, revolves critically around food transactions. On the part of the mother-in-law, there

may be an effort to permanently arrest the daughter-in-law in the role of apprentice and

quasi servant, both in the production and the consumption of food. On the part of the daughter-in-iaw, resentment over the relevant role expectations can take the form of recal-

citrance in the labor of cooking, sabotage of critical items of the meal in the kitchen, foot

dragging, and subtle misbehavior in the public context of food serving. She can also be

deliberately aggressive in eating by refusing the role of the last and lonely eater, by insist- ing on generous portions, and by diverting food from her brothers-in-law (who are her

mother-in-law's culinary favorites) to her own husband or children.

Another conflict between incumbents of key roles, expressed in the idiom of food, can

500 amerlcan ethnologist

be between unmarried daughters and newly arrived daughters-in-law, especially when their

age differences are not very considerable. The conflict here is characteristically rooted in

the fact that the unmarried daughter (although being groomed to be a good wife) i s never-

theless indulged to some degree by her parents. The daughter-in-law, on the other hand, has

made the crossing to the worst stage of a female life cycle and i s the culinary victim of her

husband's household. Such tension can either be defused by the senior female or exacer-

bated by manipulations of the culinary context, both of production and consumption.

The last context, perhaps the most interesting, where role conflict takes gastro-political

forms, is the relationship between husband and wife. The general paradigm here i s that the

wife "worships" her husband and is the provider of both sexual and culinary services to

him. She i s the receptacle of his semen and can eat his leftovers without negative moral

consequences. In general, she cooks and serves, he eats and criticizes. But in certain con-

texts this situation reverses itself, especially when the household has no other female

members of adequate age or experience and does not employ a cook. During a woman's

menstrual period, she i s totally isolated and is especially barred from any contact with the

hearth. In some households, during the four- or five-day period during which the wife can-

not cook, the husband takes on this role for her and for the children. From a structuralist

point of view, i t i s interesting to note that it i s when the woman i s most removed from the

role of genitrix and "clean" sexual partner, she also ceases to be cook. In this context, the

role reversal can have complex gastro-political consequences. Even if the husband knows

the rudiments of cooking, he might resist the role of cook and prepare simple or inappro-

priate meals. Since his wife continues to be an eater, and since there are generally other

mouths to be fed, she can take on the role of culinary critic and instructor. Many men have

no difficulty with this temporary reversal, and many couples do not enter into conflict

because of i t . But when they do, food is both the medium and the message of their con-

flicts, for i t encodes the primary consequences of gender distinctions.

Having described a variety of contexts in which food can become the locus and index of

conflict within the Tamil Brahmin household, let me now identify the specific ways by

which food can be made to serve these semiotic ends, beyond those examples of specific

gastro-political strategies that I have already mentioned. In general, food can be made to

encode gastro-political messages by manipulating the food itself (in terms of quantity or

quality) or by manipulating the context (either in terms of precedence or of degrees of com-

mensal exclusivity). From the point of view of those who control the cooking and serving

process, this can be achieved by abbreviating the meal in terms of the number of courses or

the quantities of particular food items, by altering the serving order or the seating order in a

deliberately counterintuitive way, or by inappropriate expansion of the commensal circle.

The last tactic, for example, can be achieved by placing a young adult with the children or

by placing an important and senior cousin with a "poor cousin." Recalcitrant daughters-in-

law, rude or demanding affines, dependent matrikin, undesirable guests, or inefficient ser-

vants can be brought into line by any or all of these tactics. In concrete terms, these tactics can be seen in a heavy emphasis of basic grains over vegetable or lentil accompaniments,

the transparent use of food cooked on an earlier occasion, excessive addition of water to

milk or milk-based items, the substitution of oil for clarified butter [ghee) in the meal, tea in-

stead of coffee, and so on. In general, the theme is the conspicuous transfer of cheap, easy,

or diluted items, as against expensive, labor-intensive, or concentrated foods.

Castro-politics at the household level i s not a monopoly of the heads of the household or of the manager of the hearth. Recipients, dependents, guests, and subordinates can also

use food to express their resentment of either the culinary process itself or of the larger

social context. Their main mode of gastro-political maneuver is open criticism of the largess or skill of the food-controller or, better yet, of deliberately weak compliments or

gastro-politics in India 501

double-edged expressions of gratitude. Being on the receiving end, they also have the op-

tion of simply avoiding or withdrawing from culinary contexts, either as an open and hostile

act or as a covert, implicit criticism. In general, we may notice that at the household level,

gastro-politics i s not only about issues of rank, but is also a semiotic mode for enacting con-

flicts over roles, for resolving or exacerbating ambiguities about rules, and in general for

debating and refining the fine points of the most intimate commensal context. In the mar-

riage feast and in temple ritual, as we shall see, these issues come to be writ large.

the marriage feast

The role of feasting in establishing roles, relationships, and statuses in traditional

societies is a staple of anthropological studies and therefore needs no theoretical elabora-

tion (Malinowski 1965; Geertz 1960; Powdermaker 1932). In the anthropology of South Asia,

feasts in general and marriage feasts in particular have been carefully analyzed for their

character as Hindu "potlatches" (Hanchett 19751, tournaments of rank (Marriott 1968,

1976), and occasions for sumptuary dispute (Epstein 1960). In addition, Khare

(1976a:189-203) has recently analyzed, in great detail, the ways in which food transactions

are extremely delicate registers and vehicles for cohesion as well as competition in the con-

text of North Indian Brahmin marriage feasts.

Civen this wealth of South Asian material and the basic gastro-political themes discussed

in the previous section of this essay, the Tamil Brahmiti marriage feast will not be discussed

in great detail. I shall simply highlight certain features of food transactions in those con-

texts which are germane to my larger argument.

Tamil Brahmins, like most other South Asian "twice-born" castes, invest a good deal of

energy and wealth in arranging and celebrating marriages for their offspring. By contrast

with the domestic hearth, where gastro-politics may be said to be (in a normative though

not necessarily statistical sense) occasional and abnormal, and not a regular consequence

of structural facts, the marriage feast is a quintessentially gastro-political arena. This is because the intimate, private, restricted, and everyday nature of food transactions in

the domestic hearth i s quite removed from the public, formal, extended, and extraordinary

nature of the marriage feast. Marriage feasts constitute a heavy drain on the resources of

the bride's family; yet the lavishness and harmonious conduct of such feasts, and the max-

imization of the number of satisfied guests, are crucial determinants of the future status

and reputation of the bride's family, as well as of the future strength or weakness of the af-

final bond.

In marriage feasts, for obvious reasons, the primacy of agnates over affines in the

domestic hearth i s inverted, and it is the affinal bond that is stressed. But it is not enough to

note that the principal goal of the bride's family is to ensure the gastronomic satisfaction of

the groom's family, which signifies their larger satisfaction with the alliance as an

economic and moral transaction. In addition, as in the domestic hearth, there i s a consis-

tent priority in the treatment of patrikin over matrikin. The problem in the marriage feast,

however, i s that both sorts of kin on the bride's side cannot be given the same kind of

ceremonial attention as both sorts of kin on the groom's side. The agnatic principle here is

in direct and delicate confrontation with the superiority of bride-receivers over bride-givers.

In gastro-political terms, this poses a continuous series of problems for the core hosts (the

bride's parents) in deciding who should be seated where, who should be fed in which ses-

sion b a n k t i ) of a particular meal, and so on. Civen that even a minimal marriage entails at least six major, public meals, and given that the host's decisions must take into account a

number of particular facts about the mood and status of specific guests, these are rather

502 amerlcan ethnoioglst

major sources of aggravation and entail delicate actuarial decisions in terms of perceived

social risks.

These risks are further exacerbated by what is perhaps the principal social fact of mar-

riage ceremonies: in these feasts "ascriptive" roles (based on age, sex, and kinship relations)

are consistently overshadowed by "achieved" roles. Of these "achieved" roles, the most

important are the roles of "host" and "guest." In a perfectly serious sense, the critical ques-

tion from the point of view of the bride's parents (who are the only axiomatic hosts) is: Who,

in this particular marriage ceremony, i s playing host and who is playing guest?

This ambiguity concerning hosts and guests i s a highly context-sensitive affair which

varies from one group of kindred to another, and from one alliance context to another.

There are some basic guidelines that are as follows. The groom's parents and his patrikin

are the most honored guests, followed closely by his matrikin, these constituting the core

"guests." The bride's parents and patrikin, the core "hosts," follow in rank. Lastly, there are

the bride's matrikin, who are always in danger of being slighted in gastro-political matters.

These basic guidelines are only the roughest rules in the shifting scenario of "host" andL

"guest" in a Tamil Brahmin marriage ceremony. The behavior of the bride's matrikin is

often a principal example of gastro-political tension. This set of kinsmen i s invariably

caught between the distasteful option of being inferior "hosts" (since i t is the bride's

patrikin who are, from an economic and social point of view, the primary logistical and

moral managers of the feast) or the more distasteful option of being inferior "guests" (since

the preeminent "guests" are all on the groom's side). Often, resentful of this unattractive

pair of choices, the bride's matrikin might attempt to usurp primacy at the feast by sitting

in inappropriate places of honor, by entering the eating space before they have been ex-

plicitly asked to do so, by loud complaints about the quantity or quality of the food, or

simply by wearing the kind of hurt expression that can tax the patience of any host. This

kind of behavior places particular stress on the bride's mother, who i s torn between her ties

of sentiment to her natal family, her obligations towards her husband's kinsmen, and her

overarching obligation to ensure the gastronomic satisfaction of her new affines. The same

option between playing "guest" and "host" i s also available to the bride's extended patrikin. When they are a politically united group and are on good terms with the bride's

parents, they are likely to play the role of supportive and subordinate "hosts" whose

satisfaction need not be of principal concern. But if this agnatic unit i s politically divided,

they (or, more accurately, particular patrikinsmen of the bride's father), can swing over into

playing demanding and uncompromising "guests." This i s not a comfortable situation for

the bride's parents.

In the Tamil Brahmin context, all these factors are further complicated by the persistent

tendency, already referred to, to opt for marriage between actual or classificatory cross-

cousins. When a marriage involves this structure of relations, some features of gastro-

politics are defused while others are potentially exacerbated. Important structural features

of cross-cousin marriage have been amply discussed elsewhere in the anthropological

literature on South lndia and Ceylon (Beck 1972; Dumont 1953, 1957; Yalman 19671, and I

shall not repeat them here. Suffice it to note that, in a situation where a prior relationship

of consanguinity is overlaid by a new layer of affinity, the results are complicated. On the

one hand, the marital reinforcement of preexisting, often intimate, consanguineal ties be-

tween kinsmen (which imply a certain degree of familiarity and informality) can ease the in-

herent tensions of a marriage ceremony. On the other hand, new tensions can arise which are the product of the new structural superimposition. The problem is once again the am-

biguity and optionality that this situation affords with regard to roles. In the case of actual

matrilateral cross-cousin (MBD) marriage, the bride's extended patrikin are about to become her affines and therefore can, in their new role as affines (sambandi), shift subtly,

gastro-politics in lndia 503

and even vacillate, between playing supportive "hosts" of her own parents or playing

superordinate "guests." In the case of an actual patrilateral cross-cousin (FZD) marriage,

the bride's extended matrikin, in theory subordinate hosts or inferior guests, can now

legitimately claim the primacy due to affines. I t is not hard to see how these role am-

biguities can be further exacerbated when the marriage is between classificatory cross-

cousins, and the sentimental ties of kinship proximity are muted while the categorical op-

tions remain.

Nor is the politics of food in marriage ceremonies exclusively a matter of orchestrating

actual and potential kinsmen. There are also, at most wedding ceremonies, a large number

of guests who are not kinsmen of either side and who may often be from other castes, and

some of them are invariably important to the two core parties for a variety of social,

political, and economic reasons. Marriott and others have shown how, in such contexts,

food transactions can become sensitive instruments of intercaste ranking, and their

arguments are fully relevant to the Tamil Brahmin situation (Marriott 1968; Stone 1978).

From the point of view of this essay, i t is adequate to note that these participants, too, can

choose between playing friendly quasi-host roles and taking on the style of pampered

guests, righteously guarding their perceived importance in gastro-political terms.

The point i s that the subtle shadings between the roles of host and guest are available to

a large range of persons indeed. Even on the groom's side (although they are strictly

receivers from the point of view of the expenses of the ceremony), they have to be con-

cerned about the politics of kinship in their own party. They often, therefore, are them-

selves obliged to play pseudohosts to particular members of their own entourage or their

own favored nonkin guests. In this situation, they might take special care to see, from the

point of view of food transactions, that their own obligations are fully understood by the

bride's parents, who are responsible for actual decisions about food events.

The relevance of gastro-politics to these considerations is that i t i s only in the unfolding

drama of the public meals in the marriage ceremonies that it i s possible to determine who

has chosen to play what roles, even when the degree of freedom is limited. I t is only in the

order of the seating, the extent of gastronomic solicitousness, and the carefully worded

responses that actual positions are signaled, actual reactions are registered, and actual out-

comes publicly recorded. There are, of course, other media and other arenas in which this

communication can occur, such as the nature of the accommodations, the complex

calibration of gifts and counter-gifts by the two parties, and debates over the selection of

the ritual specialists who will officiate. On the one hand, many of these other media are

restricted to relatively private transactions between the core kinsmen involved in the

alliance; they are often either resolved before the ceremony itself or shelved until after the

marriage has been completed and consummated. The medium of food, on the other hand,

i s the dominant, ubiquitous, and intrinsically public concern, from both a logistical and a

semiotic point of view.

To determine who in the gastro-political arena of a marriage ceremony has opted for

what type of role, one has to pay attention to the following kinds of questions. Who i s bear-

ing the rnana~erial burden of the purchase, storage, cooking, and serving of the food? Who are in places of priority in the eating space (panda/)? Who i s consigned to the Siberian

regions furthest from these honored guests? Who eats in the first session of any meal and

who eats in the last one? Who i s making real efforts to make others welcome and attending to their gastronomic satisfaction? Who walks up and down the aisles that separate the rows

of eaters, coaxing them to eat more and urging the food-servers to be more prodigal, more

efficient, more insistent? Who are the special targets of such attention? On the other hand, who rushes to the feasting arena without being invited? Who evaluates the food constantly and critically? Who feebly rejects the special attention being paid to him and who rejects i t

504 amerlcan ethnologist

forcefully? Who pushes their children aggressively forward during the children's food

"turn"? Who later asks their children for a careful account of which sweets and savories

were offered them, in what quantity, and with what degree of sincerity? The answers to

these and similar questions, in a particular marriage feast, are likely to yield the contingent

profile of hosts and guests. Wedding feasts, therefore, are not only a guide to the shifting

structure of intercaste ranking, but in the larger scenario of commensal transactions they

are a sensitive semiotic guide to the shifting politics of extended kinship and of the politics

of generosity in general. The principal linguistic and cultural category that dominates gastro-political thought

and action in the marriage ceremonies i s the term upachararn, which has come to have the

general meaning of obsequiousness, prodigality, and personal deference in the behavior of

any host towards a guest. But it i s not accidental that the term upachararn has the core

meaning of a sequence of ceremonial actions which constitute the basic grammar of wor-

ship (pula) in both North and South India. In the following section, when we consider the

politics of food in South lndian temples, we shall see that this semantic extension of mean-

ing from the domain of worship to hosting behavior in general is, from the cultural point of

view, neither idle nor arbitrary.

the South Indian temple

Temples and the public worship of the deities in them are important throughout South

Asia but are especially integral to the structure and fabric of South lndian society (Ap-

padurai and Breckenridge 1976). From at least the 14th century, the redistribution of food

in South lndian temples has had an important role In the agrarian economy of South lndia

(Stein 1960). Changes in the sacred cuisine in major temples were probably linked in impor-

tant ways to the changing sociopolitical organization of early modern South lndian society (Breckenridge 1978). The gods and goddesses enshrined in these temples continue today to

be the foci of an extremely varied sacred cuisine. Both folklore and contemporary behavior

suggest that these deities are seen as veritable gourmands, who have special culinary likes

and dislikes, which are catered to assiduously by their worshipers and servants (Eichinger

Ferro-Luzzi 1977, 1978; Yalman 1969).

The offering of cooked food to deities (naivedyarn) i s an integral part of a set of ritual ac-

tions (upachararn) which together comprise worship (puja). The consumption of divine left-

overs (prasadarn) is the central "sacramental" feature of collective worship in South lndian

temples. The politics of food transactions in South lndian temples is one part of a larger set

of issues, which have been dealt with elsewhere (Appadurai 1981), and I shall restrict myself

to a brief analysis of the gastro-political expressions of a complex cultural domain, which I

summarily describe below.

The temple i s a fundamentally different context for food transactions from the house-

hold and the marriage feast, for in it individuals and groups are not united principally

through ties of consanguinity or affinity, but through collective participation in the worship

of a single, sovereign deity. In the course of the daily, weekly, monthly, and annual

festivals, a large variety of families, castes, and other donative groups cooperate in the or-

chestration of complex, and often splendid, public festivals. Although the worship of

deities i s an important part of domestic life as well as of marriage ceremonies, the temple is

an ongoing collectivity united principally by worship and not by ties of kinship. In temple

worship, it i s the deities who are the honored guests. I t i s up to the many human worshipers

to work out the privileges of hosting and the shares in the largess of the deity.

The deity i s the center of the South lndian temple. But this deity is not a mere image or

gastro-politics in lndia 505

icon for the expression of abstract religious sentiments or principles. In its capacity to com-

mand and redistribute economic resources, and in its capacity to rank individuals and pro-

vide groups with public identities, it i s founded on the South lndian understanding of royal-

ty. The reigning deities of any temple are seen as kings and queens, and thus the South In-

dian temple i s a polity in which all relationships to the deity, whether of service or of gift,

are viewed as privileges (urirnai) and are seen to yield a return in the form of "honors"

(rnariyatai). Clothes worn by the deity, water drunk or used by the deity, and preeminently

the food believed to have been eaten by the deity (prasadarn) are the concrete forms of

honor. When redistributed to worshipers, these transvalued leavings of the divine meal are

perceived not simply as emblems of honor, but as constitutive features of the rights, roles,

and ranks of donors, priests, temple servants, and worshipers-at-large. The sequence, quan-

tity, and quality of these honors (especially the food honors), and the mode of their distri-

bution, are perceived by the participants as a critical component of their "shares" (panku),

as individuals and as groups, in the overall redistributive process. I t is, therefore, no sur-

prise that battles over these public redistributive acts are taken very seriously and often

engage various parties in costly and lengthy litigation in the South lndian judicial system.

Such battles can be between any of the sets of individuals and groups involved in worship,

but the example I discuss below throws into relief the meaning of such gastronomic con-

flicts for the cultural constitution of community, conceived as a group of cosharers in the

generosity of the deity. The case I present has been discussed in greater detail elsewhere (Appadurai 1981), so I

present here the bare bones of the issue. At the Sri Parthasarathi Swami Temple, a Vaisnava

shrine in Madras city, a complex political upheaval took place in the 1940s and 1950s,

which had as its central issue the proper distribution of prasadarn in worship. The move-

ment was organized by a relatively poor and disenfranchised group of non-Brahmin wor-

shipers. They claimed that they were being systematically humiliated and deliberately ex-

cluded from the community (goshti) of worshipers through the manner and context of the

redistribution of prasadarn to the congregation. They pointed out that they were served the

divine leftovers, by the priests, in different vessels than those used for the Brahmin wor-

shipers; that while they stood during the distribution of prasadarn to the Brahmin wor-

shipers, the Brahmins sat down during the non-Brahmin receipt of the sacred food; and

that, in general, the divine food was tossed at them, in their own words, as if they were

"dogs and cattle."

Reasons of space prohibit a ful l description and exegesis of the issues in this movement,

which are still alive. However, i t is important to understand that, for these non-Brahmins,

the gastronomic humiliation that they suffered was a public symbol of a larger attempt to

exclude them from their rightful share in the worship of the deity. What they wanted was

not priority (which would have been a radical demand indeed), but rather propriety, dignity,

and the respect due to them as worshipers. Their complaints drew upon the egalitarian

tradition of South lndian devotionalism, which explicitly runs against the sort of caste-

based exclusivity that characterizes South lndian life in other domains. Their petitions,

however, tread a careful line between genuine equality and a just share, between proper

hierarchy and unfair discrimination. Their efforts have since, in combination with the in-

creasing politicization of caste issues in Madras, muted at least the most explicit forms of

degradation at this temple. In their choice of metaphors, i t is interesting to notice that

these non-Brahmin petitioners above all complained that, in their case, prasadarn (the

highest form of leftover) was treated as if i t was garbage or polluted leftovers, f i t only for

dogs and cattle, the South lndian scavengers par excellence. Other examples of such gastro-political issues in South lndian temples involve donors

(and the groups they represent), priests, temple trustees, and other categories of worshipers.

506 amerlcan ethnologist

In all these cases, honors in general and sacred food in particular are alleged to have been

somehow misused or maldistributed in some respect: by the mode of distribution of the

food; by the withholding or diverting of these food shares; by the debasing of such shares

(as in the non-Brahmin case); and by restrictions imposed on who can either offer or con-

sume such sacred foods. Since these issues generally affect the offices and privileges of im-

portant individuals, and often the social identity of large and important families, lineages,

and subcastes, gastro-politics in the temple can lead to bitter and prolonged schisms.

the structure of variation

I shall now identify the general themes that appear to underlie gastro-politics in all three

arenas which have been discussed and attempt to account for the structure of variation be-

tween them. In order to do this, let me return to the argument that was briefly formulated

early in this essay. I proposed that food in South Asia is prone to be used in social messages

of two diametrically opposed sorts. I t can serve to indicate and construct social relations

characterized by equality, intimacy, or solidarity; or it can serve to sustain relations

characterized by rank, distance, or segmentation. This argument can now be refined and

expanded in light of the ethnographic data of this essay.

At the cultural and categorical level, recent work on Hindu ideology in South Asia, in

regard to the constitution of persons and the resulting consequences of interaction and

transaction, suggests that South Asian social thought appears to view persons as complex,

unstable, and weakly bounded aggregates of biomoral substance. They are therefore con-

stantly prone to moral and physiological transformation in transacting with other persons

(Marriott and lnden 1974; Marriott 1976). The prescriptive order, however, encourages in-

dividuals and groups to stabilize their states within a general cosmology or to increase cer-

tain desirable biomoral properties through appropriate transaction. At the sociological

level, though, fixity of individual and especially group (caste) status i s the desirable homeo-

stasis. But the always real possibility of disturbing any particular biomoral homeostatis,

joined with the practical requirement of shared productive and reproductive activities,

always threatens any such achieved homeostasis. The vaunted Hindu preoccupation with

"purity and pollution," with its vast plethora of rules about contact (with their endless per-

muations of rank, life-stage, context, and medium), can best be seen as an encyclopedic at-

tempt to negotiate these incompatible goals.

In this unstable biomoral cosmos, food, along with blood and semen, is a particularly

powerful medium of contact between persons and groups. In a cultural universe that sets

considerable store by a host of heterogeneous persons, groups, forces, and powers, food

(whether "hot" or "cold," raw or cooked, sacred or sullied) always raises the possibility of

homogenizing the actors linked by it, whether they are husband or wife, servant or master,

worshiper or deity. The elaborate rules that surround food in virtually every South Asian

context are, in my view, culturally organized efforts to compensate for this biophysical pro-

pensity of food to homogenize the human beings who transact through it. This i s achieved

by a variety of rules which regulate contact with food, prohibit certain classes of food to

certain classes of persons, restrict certain foods to certain contexts, dictate sequences of serving and eating, allocate distinct roles to different individuals in the cooking, serving,

and eating cycle, and so on. Of course, the cultural notion that food has an inherently homogenizing capacity (by virtue of its transformability into blood and semen) i s itself con-

verted from a metonymic hazard to a metaphoric convenience in the contexts where shar-

ing, equality, solidarity, and community are, within limits, perceived as desirable results.

In keeping with its general capacity to simultaneously encode messages about both

gastro-politics in India 507

homogeneity (whether in the form of equality, intimacy, or solidarity) and heterogeneity

(whether in the form of rank, distance, or segmentation), food transactions in the three

arenas discussed in this paper display certain common social logics. In all three domains, to

one or another degree, food transactions serve to regulate rank, reify roles, and signify

privileges, In all three arenas, transactions are built around the contrasts between host and

guest, giver and receiver, insider and outsider. The rules of each domain encode these op-

positions in the mode most appropriate to the ranks, roles, and privileges relevant to i t .

Lastly, in each of these domains the idea of homogenization i s formalized in a variety of

commensal concepts and rules, which emphasize the sharing of some sort of identity be-

tween those within the circle and some important distinction from those outside the circle.

Gastro-politics arises under these conditions because the different transactors, in any

particular context, in any one of the three arenas, invariably have some slight opposition of

interest in regard to the syntax of the specific food event. The non-Brahmin worshiper

might wish to increase the homogenizing consequences of sharing the sacred food,

whereas the Brahmin priest might wish to emphasize the heterogenizing capacities of food

events. The daughter-in-law might wish to identify herself more strongly, in gastronomic

terms, with the senior women of her husband's household, whereas these senior women are

likely to have the opposite interest. Such examples could be multiplied. When such diver-

gences of emphasis between key transactors become unacceptable to any of them, food i s likely to become the medium for struggle. In principle, as we have seen, there are only a

relatively limited set of ways in which food can be used to convey such messages: by com-

peting over the relative exclusivity or ordering of the commensal circle (in a given meal); by

debate over the quantity or quality of the food itself; and by imposing or manipulating the

moral qualities associated with any particular portion of the food (as in tussles over left-

overs, whether sacred or human). Yet this repertoire of communicative possibilities is less

limited than i t seems, given the variation of contexts (morning meals versus evening meals;

ritual contexts versus mundane contexts; the variation of available foodstuffs, depending

on the season; the family budget, and so on) and the variation of cuisines from region to

region and sometimes even from family to family.

It remains, then, to account for the different forms in which gastro-politics appears in the

three arenas of household, marriage feast, and temple ritual, given that all three arenas

operate within a shared symbolic canopy and display a common set of oppositions in food

transactions. I t is to state the obvious to point out that household, marriage feast, and tem-

ple festival are increasingly larger, more public, and more inclusive arenas with

characteristically different "functions." This is the structural backdrop to what I believe i s the essential semiotic variation in the role of food in each of them. I have already discussed

the inherent ambiguity of food in this cultural system with regard to whether i t is made to

serve the end of homogenizing the humans who share i t or whether it i s made to serve the

end of heterogenizing them. Each of these two opposed capacities has at least three

characteristic modes. Homogenizing of the transactors can occur through the increase of

intimacy, equality, or solidarity; heterogenizing can occur through an emphasis on

distance, rank, or segmentation.

In keeping with these distinctions, I would suggest that gastro-politics in the household

arena, though i t contains elements of all three oppositions, i s critically defined by the ten-

sion between intimacy and distance; the marriage feast, by the tension between equality

and rank; and the temple, by the tension between solidarity and segmentation. This follows

from the fact that in the household, as the minimal commensal and conjugal unit in which

biophysical intimacy between individuals is so great, role distance between them is essen- tial to maintain. In the marriage feast, especially given the refractive effects of cross-cousin

marriage, the central tension i s between equality and rank, since a variety of rules about

508 american ethnologist

the priority of various kinds of kinsmen can enter into conflict. Indeed, the tension between

equality and rank is at the very heart of the marriage feast because the bride's family, as

the hosts of the meal (the food-givers), are in a position of priority; but as wife-givers, they

are in a subordinate status to the groom's family. Lastly, in the temple, since ritual i s an in-

trinsically segmented affair, where different groups participate in different periods,

aspects, and portions of the ritual process, the central issue is the tension between the

solidarity of collective worship (even if the worshipers are neither equal nor intimate) and

the segmentary identities that donative groups, priests, and worshipers also crave (though

they are willing to forego or temporarily suspend issues of rank and distance).

Gastro-politics for Hindus, then, is rather like what Clifford Geertz (1973:412-453) has

argued about cockfights for the Balinese: it is "deep play." It i s a species of competitive en-

counter within a shared framework of rules and meanings in which what is risked are pro-

found conceptions of self and other, high and low, inside and outside. In a society in which

the self i s a complex and unstable entity, rank is destiny, and exclusiveness is survival,

these stakes are high indeed. Transactions around food represent, in Hindu society, perhaps

the central currency of such "deep play" precisely because food is built into such a variety

of arenas. Thus, whenever food is exchanged in one domain, i t carries some of the mean-

ings of its roles into other domains. Food transactions within the household acquire some

of the public force of the marriage feast and some of the cosmological implications of wor-

ship; the marriage feast acquires some of the testy intimacy of the domestic meal and some

of the collective solemnity of temple worship; and, ceremonial food transactions in

temples acquire some of the emotional force of the domestic hearth and some of the ethos

of alliance of the marriage feast.

These transfers of meaning are encoded in the language of sharing, of connubiurn, of left-

overs, and of worship which appear, in indigenous discourse, in every food-related do-

main. Food may generally possess a special semiotic force because of certain universal p rop

erties, as I argue at the beginning of this essay. But this special force must always remain

tacit until i t i s animated by particular cultural concepts and mobilized by particular social

contexts. To extend this analysis of Hindu gastro-politics would require a comparative in-

vestigation of the relevant meanings and contexts in other cultures.

notes

Acknowledgments. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Xth International Conference of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences in New Delhi, December 1978, and to the departments of South Asia Regional Studies and Folklore at the University of Pennsylvania. Criticisms and com- ments from colleagues on each of these occasions have been helpful in revising the paper for publica- tion.

' Here, as in other domains, food and food events appear to serve an important mnemonic function, since they serve to remind actors of past episodes, prior states of social relationships, and previous debts and claims; however, i t is outside the scope of this essay to ful ly explore this mnemonic function of food events. Suffice i t to note that i t is probably linked to the sensory and emotional immediacy of food consumption. How such immediacy relates to the faculty of memory in particular sociological and cultural contexts is a problem that might require the attention of psychological anthropologists. For our present purposes, it is sufficient to note that the semiotic virtuosity of food is clearly strength- ened by its mnemonic utility.

gastro-politics in India 509

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Submitted 30 May 1980 Accepted 1 August 1980 Final revisions received 17 September 1980

gastro-polltlcs In lndla 511

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Gastro-Politics in Hindu South AsiaArjun AppaduraiAmerican Ethnologist, Vol. 8, No. 3, Symbolism and Cognition. (Aug., 1981), pp. 494-511.Stable URL:

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Feasts in New Ireland; The Social Function of EatingHortense PowdermakerAmerican Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 34, No. 2. (Apr. - Jun., 1932), pp. 236-247.Stable URL:

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