Thanks, Ian, for an opportunity to contribute belatedly (entirely my fault – sorry). I’ve re-read your papers and most of the posts to date, and find these rich in nuance, reflections and tough questions. With your deadline looming, I just want to sift through a couple of their many ingredients that together promise a satisfying review.
At the moment I’m starting work on an ethnography of an Ethiopian restaurant in an inner-suburb of Adelaide, Australia. (I’m an Anglo-celtic Australian woman, virtually monolingual, with England and Singapore the only countries I’ve ever lived in – at least for any considerable time.) With each new research project, it seems I experience afresh the hooks (1992)/Cook et al (1999)/Heldke (2003)/whoever [add your favourite anthropologists here] dilemmas of ‘eating the Other’, with all their attendant feelings of guilt and ambivalence. To assuage the conscience, I once promised myself that I would only carry out ethnographic work in which I had some legitimate ‘location’, some connection, a reason for hanging around. Hence, my account (Duruz, 2007) of the introduction of the nyonya dish laksa (from the Straits Settlements of Malacca, Penang and Singapore) into the culinary and political cultures of Adelaide during the 1970s and 1980s. At first, this chapter took shape as a story of Singaporean and Malaysian immigrant communities’ home-making through ‘productive nostalgia’ (Blunt, 2003: 722), with the taste of laksa becoming ritually associated with small businesses established close to the fresh food market where I shop every week. Over time, this chapter took on a life of its own, teasing out a story of a generation of Anglo-Australians – their coming-of-age (politically, culinarily) and nostalgic yearning about this subsequently.
However, while laksa might form part of my own political history, especially in an earlier climate of Australian leftist/feminist/ multiculturalist leanings towards Asia, the road now to my neighbourhood café, Addis Ababa, with its ‘olfactory geographies’ (Law, 2001: 273) of injera (bread baked from rice-flour) and dishes of robustly spiced siga wat and fasolia, is less clear. After all, this is not my community. This is not my food. This is not my language. Am I just a greedy stickybeak once again? Probably … but not quite.
To allay the usual breast-beating and guilt (though not for a minute denying the seriousness of cultural theft through appropriation and commodification), I turn to the following as sources of comfort. Traditionally, I’ve found a kind of solace in the resonances of Ien Ang’s conception of ambivalence (2001: 200-201). Ian has already quoted my drawing on Ien Ang in a previous paper (see ‘mixing’, n.vi ), so I’ll simply add here that the element of instability that Ang’s ‘ambivalence’ implies can be very useful – one is never too comfortable, too complacent, but, at the same time, never so completely unsettled that some kind of cultural exchange becomes impossible. In this way, guilt is transformed into an effective tool for understanding difference rather than hovering in the wings, always ready to perform a script of self-indulgent self-blame in which the white ‘ “Anglo”-cosmopolitan eating subject’ (Hage, 1997: 118) is (yet again) positioned centre stage. Comfort is also to be found in Narayan’s powerful decentring of whiteness as the fulcrum of relationships to ‘others’, and her shifting of emphasis to relationships between various ‘others’ (1997: 184). I have been playing with this idea for some time, and it seems it has also emerged in different forms within the posts. Crudely put, despite my Anglo middle-classness, cultural capital and just plain disposable capital, at Addis Ababa I am not the centre of attention. The focus here, instead, is on the strength of the Ethiopian community (its culture, languages, politics, food, religion, citizenship status) and its complex relationships with various ‘others’ (refugees, poor people, students, working class ‘Anglo’ women, academics, travelers, local workers, various ethnic groups – African, Asian) who appear at its doors. I am treated kindly, but often ignored, which is salutary (I suppose). At the same time, this is not to deny the circuits of power in which small ‘ethnic’ food businesses are placed: a positioning usually to their disadvantage and certainly not one of privilege.
More recently, my place and actions at the corner table (enthusiastically mopping up curries with injera, licking the last tastes from my fingers, inhaling the spicy aromas from the smoking bark accompanying the coffee, listening to the sound of animated conversation I can’t understand …) has been confirmed by Lai Ah Eng. Researching exchanges in ‘mixed’ public housing neighbourhoods in Singapore, she says:
While there is an advantage and need … [for researchers to work within their own ethnic communities] there is also a place, and perhaps even a necessity for researchers to go beyond their own ethnic boundaries to undertake cross-cultural work. After all, in a multi-ethnic society, there is nothing more crucial than interethnic and cross-cultural understanding – a task that both the anthropologist and the oral historian are in a very good position to effect (1998: 113).
As a faux geographer (sympathetic to, but with a different intellectual lineage from those who call geography ‘home’) as well as an ardent ethnographer, here I want to respond to Damian Mayne’s question on ‘following’ as imagery/a strategy in teaching and research: ‘must following always to be ethnographic and about relations between producers and consumers?’ While the answer is probably no, I suppose, I actually want to take the discussion elsewhere, commenting briefly on the power of ethnography for unravelling binaries (production/consumption; self/other; embodied/abstracted) and disrupting the taken-for-granted. Most of my own work has evolved from the curious, unsettling detail in people’s stories – the moment that doesn’t ‘fit’, offering the opportunity to ‘think against the grain’ of established theoretical frameworks. It is this ‘not-fitting’ that I find so beguiling and so challenging. Furthermore, through the dynamic of talking and listening (while tasting, touching and hearing and smelling), it is possible to trace how people try/don’t try to make their stories ‘fit’ or subversively allow these to poke beyond the usual boundaries. A mother originally from an Ethiopian village who, contrary to ‘tradition’, has also learnt to make lasagna and pizza … the practice of handwashing in the restaurant explained to Anglo-Australians as necessary for purposes of ‘hygiene’, to various ‘others’ as respect for ‘culture’ – such details permit the strangeness of the everyday (Highmore, 2002: 12ff) but also the possibility of multiple perceptions and more complicated conceptions of identities than mythical figuring allows.
Time to go home. I’ll be back at Addis next week, still curious, always hungry for more. Meanwhile, the taste of siga wat lingers.
Additional References:
Ang, A. (2001) On Not Speaking Chinese: Living between Asia and the West. London: Routledge.
Blunt, A. (2003) Collective memory and productive nostalgia: Anglo-Indian homemaking at McCluskieganj. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 21, 717-38.
Cook, I., Crang P. & Thorpe, M. (1999) Eating into Britishness: multicultural imaginaries and the identity politics of food. In Sasha Roseneil and Julie Seymour (eds) Practising Identities: Power and Resistance. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 223-248.
Duruz, J (2007) From Malacca to Adelaide … : fragments towards a biography of cooking, yearning and laksa. In Sidney C.H. Cheung and Tan Chee-Beng (eds) Food and Foodways in Asia: Resource, Tradition and Cooking. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 183-200.
Hage, G. (1997) At home in the entrails of the west: multiculturalism, ‘ethnic food’ and migrant home-building. In Helen Grace, Ghassan Hage, Lesley Johnson, Julie Langsworth and Michael Symonds Home/World: Space, Community and Marginality in Sydney’s West. Annandale, NSW: Pluto, 99-153.
Heldke, L. (2003) Exotic Appetites: Ruminations of a Food Adventurer. London: Routledge.
Highmore, B. (2002) Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction. London: Routledge.
Lai, A.E. ((1998) Some experiences and issues of cross-cultural fieldwork. In P. Lim Pui Huen, James H. Morrison and Kwa Chong Guan (eds) Oral History in Southeast Asia: Theory and Method. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 98-115.
Law, L. (2001) home cooking: Filipino women and geographies of the senses in Hong Kong. Ecumene 8 (3), 264-283.
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