User:Nadyap/Feasting and Inequality

A feast is a large meal, typically one in celebration of a special event or rite, shared among two or more people. Within anthropology, feasting is generally understood to be a social practice used to build, maintain, or contest bonds between individuals, groups, and communities. Feasting is seen as a way for groups of people or individuals to build social ties through the exchange of food and gifts because these exchanges create obligations among participants to return the hospitality shown to them. First made popular by the work of Marcel Mauss on potlach and conspicuous consumption, the study of feasting within anthropology has grown to include many different forms of feasts and the multiple ways they function in social contexts all over the world and throughout history.

Approaches to Feasting Practices

Mauss: Potlatch and conspicuous consumption

In his influential book The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies Marcel Mauss frames feasts and the events which often accompany them as cycles of gift exchange which create bonds between individuals and communities. Mauss uses the ethnographic example of potlatch, as observed among indigenous peoples of the Northwest Pacific Coast, to illustrate his point. "The word potlatch essentially means 'to feed', 'to consume'" . An individual or group demonstrates the wealth and power at their disposal through the conspicuous consumption of food and items considered socially valuable. "The obligation to give is the essence of the potlatch". By giving away all or almost all of their possessions, the host group demonstrates their ability to draw on unlimited resources and the assurance of their survival. This act of giving is a direct challenge to other groups, an attempt to draw them into social competition. "It is a struggle between nobles to establish a hierarchy amongst themselves from which their clan will benefit at a later date".

As Mary Douglas writes in her foreword to Mauss’ book: “[t]he theory of the gift is a theory of human solidarity”. In contrast to the selfless, altruistic gift of the Christian tradition, Mauss formulates the gift in terms of the enforcement of social obligations through competitive exchange and generosity. “There are no free gifts; gift cycles engage persons in permanent commitments that articulate the dominant institutions”. As in Malinowski’s interpretation of the Kula ring, the giving of gifts and feasts creates an unspoken contract between the giver and the receiver. The creation of a debt based on the exchange of hospitality or a gift binds the recipient to the donor as long as the debt remains unpaid. The value of such a gift is not in the objects or food items themselves so much as in the social ties they create.

“[E]xchanges and contracts take place in the form of presents: in theory these are voluntary, in reality they are given and reciprocated obligatorily” . For Mauss, the obligatory nature of feasting and gift exchange is sublimated, concealed by the rhetoric of pure generosity without ulterior motive. In this framework, a gift is never given and a feast is never held, without it functioning in some way to create social bonds and networks. Though it may not be publicly admitted, there is the assumption that everyone in the community understands this to be the case.

Dietler: Commensal Politics

According to Michael Dietler, “commensality is a powerfully expressive trope of intimacy creating and reproducing relationships capable of encompassing sustained aggressive competition by effectively euphemizing it in a symbolic practice encouraging collective misrecognition of the self-interested nature of the process”. The emphasis here is on “aggressive competition” masked by ideas which often have more socially acceptable connotations, such as hospitality and generosity. The implication is that although all members taking part in these societal conventions understand on some level that the openly stated purpose of public displays of generosity are not always (or even mostly) the real motivations. These members continue to participate in such a collective fiction because it allows them to pursue their own self-interest while seeming to maintain public standards of community solidarity. Dietler divides what he terms “commensal politics” into three categories: empowering feasts, patron-role feasts, and diacritical feasts.

1. Empowering feasts

   Empowering feasts relate to the idea of social gatherings which are understood “sincerely by participants as harmonious celebrations of community identity and unity” but which are at the same time arenas for the acquisition of prestige and social credit. Such feasts may be hosted by an individual, kin-group or household, and generally focus on creating and maintaining ties within the community, though at the same time providing opportunities for emerging social distinctions.

2. Patron-role feasts

   Patron-role feasts involve an unequal pattern of hospitality in which those invited to the feast are understood not to be in a position to reciprocate in an equally lavish manner, which functions to formalize asymmetrical relations of power between the host and guests. Such feasting may take place in a community with an emerging elite who are in the process of attempting to solidify their social position and enhance their personal prestige by engaging the goodwill and support of other members of their community.

3. Diacritical feasts

   Diacritical feasts employ specialty cuisines and modes of consumption (elaborate codes of etiquette) in order to reify concepts of ranked differences in class and social status. Diacritical feasting generally occurs among elites as a display of power, wealth, and social status, and marks the achievement of complex social stratification.

Hayden: Resource Control

Brian Hayden lists nine practical benefits of the potential advantages of feasting. Among these are the mobilization of labour, the creation of cooperative alliances, the investment of surplus, the ability to attract potential mates, labour resources, or allies through the display of material success, the creation of a network of reciprocal debts, the ability to solicit favours, and compensation for transgressions. According to Hayden, and in line with Mauss, most of the benefits of feasts cluster around the creation and maintenance of important social relationships. It is possible for feasting to function in these ways because of the central role food and beverages play in human life. “Because of the daily need for these elements, they can be a powerful means of social control: manipulating access to food and drink or to essential means of production can be translated into control over people”. It is the idea that somehow the control over important resources can transform into control over human beings which connects feasting to social competition in Hayden's work.

Clark and Blake: Self Aggrandizement

John Clark and Michael Blake “postulate the necessary presence of ambitious males (aggrandizers) competing for prestige within a regional setting”. Aggrandizers must persuade people to follow them and support their initiatives, often by employing incentives and strategies which appear to conform to the self-interest of their followers. This process often starts at home, argue Clark and Blake, where an aggrandizer accumulates resources (which he can later entice supporters with) “by the sweat of his brow, and through the efforts of his wife (wives) and children. The more wives and children the better”.

Social competition is thought to be the result of situations in which people pursuing their own self-interests come into conflict with one another. Self-interest in this case is presumed to be the accumulation of social influence and prestige, which is defined as public recognition by supporters and the ensuing control of resources provided by those supporters. In competing for prestige in their own community and beyond, these ambitious individuals become the engine for social change. From this springs related arguments about the increasing social stratification which results from the control and display of an individual’s prestige through feasting.

Feasting and Gender

Based on models such as Mauss and Clark and Blake, the main focus of research on feasting practices has primarily been based on the idea of a hypothetical individual; a self-aggrandizing actor aspiring to elite status (typically gendered male) whose efforts to manipulate an unwitting populace are variously met with success or failure, depending on his ability to marshal resources and labour, and out-do his rivals in lavishness and hospitality. Though not always explicitly employed by scholars, this model, or a version of it, is visible in their work through the use of the unproblematized male subject position, which is still widely used as the default when discussing the individual. When the gender of an individual is not specifically addressed, it is generally assumed that the social actor is male.

However, some researchers have noted the importance of gender and gender roles in relation to feasting practices. Dietler writes that "gender as a cultural category of social identity is nearly everywhere marked, reified, and naturalized to some extent through feasting practices. In fact, gender is one of the most common categorical distinctions made through food/drink-related practices in general, albeit in a wide variety of culturally specific ways". In many cultures both in the past and presently, food gathering and processing is done by women, and involves a great deal of time and labour.

Feasting and Ritual

An important element of Dietler’s analysis of feasting includes the consideration of feasting as a form of ritual. Ritual is here defined as a set of circumscribed and repeated actions performed in relation to either social or religious custom which posses some form of symbolic meaning for those performing them. Rituals function to condense a variety of meanings into a set of actions which, as Dietler argues, infuse social norms with emotion. This shared emotional experience hypothetically allows participants to naturalize elements of inequality in their relationships by subsuming them to a greater ideology, whether religious or otherwise.

Archaeologically, Julia Hendon notes that among the ancient Maya, important lifecycle events such as birth, ear-piercing, marriage, pregnancy, and death, required feasting to commemorate them. Brian Stross suggests that “religious feasting is a common ritual practice pertaining to effecting a successful conclusion to activities [...] that are otherwise more likely to have uncertain outcomes”. This facility of feasting to bridge marginal territories is partially due to the fact that the action of eating is never only or simply a biological function, it is also a ‘technique du corps’ which inscribes meaning on and through the body in the performance of culturally determined physical actions. It is by incorporating ritual into aspects vital to human life, such as food consumption, that rituals gain and retain the power to influence people’s actions and emotions, which can, in turn, lead to social manipulation by individuals or groups.