Rice Talks by Avieli Nir

Author:Avieli, Nir
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780253005304
Publisher: Indiana University Press

THE HOIANESE FESTIVE CULINARY SCENARIO

The similarity between the ancestor worship and wedding feasts in terms of structure, sequence, and content is striking: Hoianese feasts seem to follow a single formula. This uniformity is unexpected for two reasons: first, the feasts were offered in very different ritual contexts: death memorials as opposed to weddings; second, they were prepared by people of considerably different socioeconomic backgrounds. Thus, what we have here is a general formula that arranges all Hoianese feasts, transcending ceremonial and social categories. Following Ortner (1973, 1990), I suggest terming this general formula “the Hoianese festive culinary scenario.”

Ortner defines cultural scenarios as “pre-organized schemes of action, symbolic programs for the staging and playing out of standard social interactions in a particular culture.” Thus, “every culture contains not just bundles of symbols … [or] ideologies but also organized schemas for enacting (culturally typical) relations and situations” (1990: 60). Cultural scenarios are general operative schemes that social actors implement in practice and, by doing so, imbue their actions with meaning. Ortner claims that such scenarios include “not only formal … named events, but also all those cultural sequences of action which we can observe enacted and reenacted according to unarticulated formulae in the normal course of daily life” (1973: 1341). In the next pages I will discuss the Hoianese general formula for festive meals as a “culinary scenario.”

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