Political Gastronomy by Michael A. LaCombe

Author:Michael A. LaCombe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Published: 2012-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

“To Manifest the Greater State”: English

and Indians at Table

Formal meals are, as one scholar of the subject has called them, “a fundamental instrument and theater of political relations,” but the distinction between playwright, players, and audience in this particular theater was not always clear. English leaders like Sir Humphrey Gilbert, John Winthrop, and Edward Maria Wingfield recognized that they could not always hope to stage a successful performance at meals even when they hosted their own countrymen. To offer a meal was the most direct way to express rich meanings, whether distinctions of status and precedence or a desire for peaceful relations with an important visitor. But one could not avoid conveying these meanings by failing to offer a meal, by failing to mark the meal as an important occasion, or worst of all by failing to include a visitor in a meal.1

Formal meals were even more fraught with tension when they included Indian and English leaders, occasions that return the spotlight to where we began: the hospitality offered by Granganimeo’s wife to Arthur Barlowe and the rest of his party. A narrow focus on the fine details of dining—seating arrangements, furniture, clothing, tableware, hand washing, manners, the foods served, and the manner and order of serving them—draws on food’s many layers of meaning to examine the most subtle and nuanced of all encounters. English and Indians closely examined every feature of the meals they shared, knowing that they carried messages. Both sides soon became familiar enough with the symbolic language of meals to convey the meanings they wanted, and as they learned about each other, both sides used this knowledge not only to avoid offense but to assert superiority.

English writers paid special attention to wedding feasts, occasions when gender and status distinctions were marked with special care. This signaled their interest (and their readers’ interest) in how social relationships were staged at formal meals. An even more striking example of the significance of meals is false hospitality. Time and again, English and Indians invited each other to a meal with the intention of violent betrayal, and with puzzling regularity these invitations were accepted. These occasions underscore the fact that invitations could not be ignored without making a powerfully negative statement. They also remind us that the early period was marked as much by violence as by peaceful alliances. Food lay at the heart of all these encounters.

At home and abroad, the English placed a high importance on hospitality, and the accounts of English travelers and settlers in the Americas often remarked that Algonquians held hospitality in similarly high regard. Many writers recounted evidence of unstinting generosity among Indians even when food was scarce. William Wood was one of these approving observers: “they are as willing to part with their Mite in poverty, as treasure in plenty. As he that kills a Deere, sends for his friends, and eates it merrily: So he that receives but a piece of bread from an English hand, parts it equally betweene himselfe and his comerades, and eates it lovingly.

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