The Meaning of Whitemen by Ira Bashkow

Author:Ira Bashkow [Bashkow, Ira]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Sociology, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, Ethnic Studies
ISBN: 9780226530062
Google: fCFBDwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 2466689
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2006-07-17T00:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 5.1 • The baby and the stick; the taro plant (adapted from Iteanu 1993a, 34)

It is through food crops that people indirectly “get” their rootedness later in life as well. This happens both by eating the foods and by cultivating them. Taro themselves embody rootedness, which is expressed in taro’s heaviness, hardness, and strength. As we saw earlier, Orokaiva gardeners cultivate strong, hard taro by encouraging the plants’ roots to descend as deeply as possible into the soil, and by allowing mature taro to ripen until they are so strongly rooted that they cannot be moved. A person who eats taro routinely incorporates these qualities. But it is not only by eating “rootedness” that Orokaiva themselves become rooted; they also become rooted through the fact that their foods must be planted, necessarily on their own lands: they must cultivate their food gardens in order to eat. People’s rootedness in their lands, in other words, is derived from practical and situational as well as mystical and sympathetic relationships. As suggested by Kingsford’s joke (see chapter 3), Orokaivas’ taro weigh them down with the ‘heaviness of earth’ because their need to grow it ties them to particular local lands. Orokaiva are tied to their taro, and their taro, in turn, are tied to the ground.

This quality of “rootedness,” then, describes one way that Orokaiva talk about the qualities they derive from and share with their foods. But there is yet another way, which might in contrast be glossed as “expansiveness,” a quality of mobility that we have seen associated with lightness in persons and with hardness in foods. There is a basic type of conversion from the rootedness of foods to an expansive quality in persons. For one thing, as we have seen, taro that is heavy and hard from being well rooted in the ground produces in people who eat it a deep, heavy sleep that promotes bodily growth or expansion. And when given away in feasting, it is the heaviness of such taro that ‘presses down’ its recipients, symbolically vanquishing them, thereby expanding its givers’ name and influence. Thus, the particular qualities of heaviness and hardness that taro receive from rootedness in the ground (gardeners expend enormous effort to get their taro to root deeply) are critical to the expansion of the social person with whom the food is identified (see also Munn 1986).

The main work Orokaiva do is cultivate food that will maintain their bodies, nurture their families, and support their exchange relationships. People’s garden foods are the critical resource that enables them to achieve any large aim. Hospitality and food exchanges wax when people’s gardens thrive, and wane when they fail. Men plan their feasts—at which they seek renown, but also risk failure should their foods come up short—according to the state of their gardens, predicting as well as they can the time of greatest abundance, hoping they will not have to call the whole thing off because the crop fell short. Indeed, people themselves grow fat and lean with the seasons of their gardens.

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