Full Description
Food has an important role in establishing and structuring social and kin relations in Southeast Asian societies. For this reason, there is growing interest within anthropology in understanding how the production, processing and consumption of food is one important basis for the construction of ties of relatedness, so-called 'kin' ties. These are often based at least partly on 'shared substance. In this respect, a book on Southeast Asia is especially interesting in understanding kinship since the region is generally taken to include a number of distinct types of kin structure.This book offers eleven chapters covering a range of societies in different parts of Southeast Asia. It examines ways in which food is used to think about and bring about ties between generations and within generations - including between the living and the dead - in particular through the feeding relationship. Significant parallels emerge between the societies covered: in the role of rice especially; in gender complementarity in relation to different foods; in the belief that food and drink carry fertility, 'blessings' or 'life force' from ascending to descending generations; and in the use of the feeding relationship to generate hierarchy. These parallels suggest that there may be underlying similarities in cosmology between these widely varying societies.
A significant contribution to the ongoing debate on the nature of kinship in Southeast Asia, this volume will be useful as a textbook for courses within anthropology, including on the anthropology of food and environmental anthropology.
Contents
Contributors 1. Introduction: Feeding the right food: the flow of life and the construction of kinship in Southeast Asia (Monica Janowski) 2. Reconstructing the Whole: Seven months pregnancy ritual in Kerek, East Java (Rens Heringa) 3. Food and the Family: Assimilation in a Malay village (Fiona Kerlogue) 4. Food, Fertility and Kinship in Minangkabau (Carol Davis) 5. Being 'Big', Being 'Good': Feeding, kinship, potency and status among the Kelabit of Sarawak (Monica Janowski) 6. Nurturance and the Spectre of Neglect: Sasak ways of dealing with the dead (Kari G. Telle) 7. Nurturing Memories: The cycle of mortuary meals in an East Indonesian village (Timo Kaartinen) 8. Constructing Bodies, Constructing Identities: Nurture and kinship ties in a Papuan society (Dianne van Oosterhout) 9. Rice Rituals, Kinship Identities and Ethnicity in Central Flores (Willemijn de Jong) 10. Rice for the Ancestors: Food offerings, kinship and merit among the Isan of Northeast Thailand (Stephen Sparkes) References Index
