thecultureapprentice

[thecultureapprentice]

an anthropology anecdote: onion soup

if you aren’t so familiar with anthropology, the most magical thing about it is that it reminds us that we all do, eat, say, and joke about strange things from somebody else’s perspective. many of us live in isolation from worldviews vastly different than our own and good anthropology will reveal to you the absurdities of your own culture. but it can be simpler than that too.

so to share with you today, here is one of my favourite anthropology anecdotes:

I was invited to go hunting with several of my Mixtec friends. We hadn’t had much luck, only managing to shoot a couple of thin squirrels. Toward the end of the day I was following my friends up the side of a ridge. They were well ahead of me, and when I finally reached the top I could see them crouched around something at the base of a tree and talking excitedly. As I approached, I saw it was a beehive, which one of them knocked down with a stick. When it hit the ground it split open, revealing a mass of comb, honey, and bee larvae. My three friends were busy tearing out pieces of the hive – including those containing the bee larvae – and popping them into their mouths. One of them suddenly stood up and said ‘Wait, we’re being impolite.’ He reached down into the hive and pulled out a big glob of comb, honey, and squiggling bee larvae. He then turned to me and said, while holding out his hand, ‘Here John, this is all for you.’ Seeing no way to refuse him I took it from him, held my breath, put it in my mouth and swallowed.

About a year later I got revenge of sorts when I invited some of the same people over to my house to eat. As a surprise I prepared onion soup, something I am partial to but had never seen served anywhere in Oaxaca. After serving out the portions, I noticed that my guests were slow to begin eating. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw one of my hunting companions pour his bowl out onto the dirt floor behind a table. When I asked if there was something wrong they at first refused to say anything until one finally, with a disgusted look on his face said ‘Onions have a terrible odour and, if you eat too much of them it makes you stupid’!

-from John Monaghan and Peter Just, Social & Cultural Anthropology: A Very Short Introduction.

Monaghan and Just go on to discuss that how we define food is completely relative as larvae are actually incredibly nutritious, and much of the popular food we consume in north america is either flat out unhealthy or devoid of much nutrition.

one food theory says that we more easily eat what is further away from us in relation. for example, many people feel repulsion at the thought of eating organs, which is explained by the idea that we are all the same on the inside and it is akin, in our minds, to cannibalism. it also explains why more people in north America would likely choose to eat a horse over a dog, because horses are traditionally our workers while dogs are our friends and family. but still, eating a horse is not ideal as they play important roles in our society. of course this theory does not explain why we reject insects as food, but it is one way to investigate what we define as food as edibility is not explanation enough.

[thecultureapprentice]

women & beauty

there are undoubtedly some characteristics of a woman's face and body that are considered universally beautiful among all cultures: facial and bodily symmetry, smooth skin and youthfulness, and a certain waist:hip ratio that varies only slightly cross-culturally.

our babies are seemingly innately drawn to faces we consider attractive, which tells us that not all beauty ideals are culturally constructed. but of course there are incredible variations across cultures that dictates what is attractive for women to wear, what their body parts should look like, and what size they should be. in today's north america and in much of europe thin women dominate mass media. they are often idolized in magazines, on the runway, and in day-to-day life; meanwhile, fat women suffer the opposite. but you do not need me to tell you this; to continue on arguing this point would be as to beat a dead horse given the amount of attention focused on the pressure women of all sizes face in western culture.

I. Azawagh Arab women

while all cultures prefer women to have a certain amount of curve or a distinguished waist:hip ratio, the preferred size of women through time and across cultures is hugely variant. the Azawagh Arab women provide one example of what most of western society might find even repulsive: women are expected to be large and much of their daily life they must eat high fat foods to maintain their size. the Azawagh Arabs see fatness as beautiful, sexy and womanly. a surface understanding of desirable body size might attribute this to the availability of food; where food is scarce, to be fat means to be wealthy and of higher social class. while this is certainly a valid hypothesis it is not necessarily the only factor in considering why fatness is considered so beautiful.

girls begin the fattening process when they lose their first baby teeth. their mothers and grandmothers are in charge of ensuring that the girls eat enough to fatten. they eat very healthy foods including milk, porridge, and grains. they have complicated rules that surround what to eat and when, and they follow a humoral belief system of the body whereby the body will be healthy or ill depending on how 'hot' or 'cold' and how 'open' or 'closed' it is; foods can also be categorized under this system.

Rebecca Popenoe studied and wrote her ethnography about the Azawagh Arabs called 'Feeding Desire' in the early 2000s. she suggests that their view of fat women as attractive is deeply interwoven with other cultural views, and not just as representative of the difficulty of acquiring food in a desert. they explain fatness as attractive, that men like it, and that it accelerates the change of a girl into womanhood. Popenoe suggests that Islam plays a significant role in their construction of beauty, and although the Azawagh Arabs are not blatant about this fact they are insistent about Islam's centrality to their lives. Azawagh Arabs see women and men as inherently different by the word of God, and this is what makes them attracted to one another. fattening women increases that difference and thus the attraction. plumper men in this society are mocked for being feminine; fatness is a characteristic of beauty exclusive to women to reinforce the differences between them.

it is worth noting that while our perception of fatness is that it is unhealthy, these women eat incredibly healthily and do not suffer the illnesses that many obese women in north america do to the same degree, and in fact our obsession with thinness has had very negative effects in terms of mental health in both young women and men.

[thecultureapprentice]

the simple fact of the matter is that nobody has ever truly been a discoverer. the vikings did not discover north america and cortez was certainly not the first to come across south america. homo sapien has tread across essentially every piece of land this earth has to offer (aside from antarctica, which was obviously discovered by the penguin) for thousands of years.

forget how you think about history, borders, and time itself. we are all merely finding our place in the world through the ways that we know and come to know as we age. anthropologists are allegedly scientists of society and culture, and the discipline was born of colonialism, with these scientists 'discovering' new peoples and recording their behaviour. this is not so anymore. anthropology is one of the few happier results of cultures meeting. we do not discover. we congregate, interact, and remember. we reflect on ourselves. and the last thing that anthropologists are? experts. the experts of the culture are those contained within it. an anthropologist is just an apprentice of another culture, for the purposes of sharing knowledge of differences in their own culture in hopes of encouraging compassion and empathy, true embracing of differences. not an expert; not a discoverer. a learner. a recorder. a participant; an apprentice. a culture apprentice.