Читать книгу Sacred Cows and Chicken Manchurian - James Staples - Страница 14

This book also pays particular attention to the materials in and through which meanings are conveyed, shaped, or negotiated, as in the work of Harris, Goody, Mintz, and the “new materialists.” For followers of the structuralist anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1963)—whose theory drew heavily on structural linguistics—it was mostly the relationship between symbols, rather than their materiality, that gave them their particular meaning. As is the case for language, the relationship between the symbol and the thing it represents is often arbitrary. Some of the material symbols in the following chapters might well be thought of in much the same way. The dusty china tea cups that make an appearance in chapter 2, for example, were significant not because they were intrinsically more valuable than the glass or stainless-steel beakers but because of the contrast between the two kinds of drinking vessel. My hosts often had only one china cup (sometimes only a plastic replica of a china cup) but several metal or glass ones; serving a guest with a cup that was different from the others signified difference and more importance. In a similar way, the very chewiness of meat, usually encountered only weekly, if that, contrasted against the softness of more regularly consumed vegetable and dal dishes, was a key part of what marked it as special and celebratory (or conversely, as taboo). The contrast, or the relationship between the meat and vegetables, was, one might argue, more significant than the things themselves, even if that contrast was manifest through material differences.

In many other instances, however, there are very specific relationships between the things I describe and what they have come to represent. Bovine animals and their products—each with their own distinctive smells, sounds, textures, and tastes—are central here. From the warmth of a cow’s breath and the mouth-feel of her milk, to dead or dying bodies under the knives of the “cutting men” or the wafts of a beef curry from a pot bubbling on the stove, what cows and buffaloes come to mean at different times is intrinsically bound up in their viscerality. But plenty of other materials come under the spotlight too. Caste and class identities, for example, play out in very concrete ways, not just through the different kinds of food people eat—whether they eat or do not eat meat, for example—but through an array of much more subtle changes in how those foods are prepared and eaten. The subtlety with which dishes are spiced, whether those spices are finely or coarsely ground, and how they are served and eaten all convey messages about those who prepare and eat them, and can also be manipulated, in some cases, to affect social mobility. The locations and paraphernalia that accompany the serving of food are likewise communicative. Everything from cups, plates, and bowls—and the very materials they are made from—to the tables, chairs, tablecloths, and floor mats on which meals are served, consciously or otherwise, convey and shape meaning.

The capacity for things to take on particular meanings is constrained or extended by the wider contexts within which they come to exist. If the capacity of particular objects to convey honor relies on their rarity, for example, that capacity becomes diminished if and when those objects became more commonplace. At times, however, material changes might in themselves be utilized to articulate the more abstract consequences of change. Evoking the simplicity of earlier cuisine in relation to the complexities of modern eating, for example, was one of the most powerful ways my interlocutors expressed their thoughts and feelings about the confusions and contradictions of life in the contemporary moment.