Foodscapes, Foodfields, and Identities in the YucatÁn. Steffan Igor Ayora-Diaz

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СКАЧАТЬ in all domains of public interaction. In the contemporary multicultural environment that characterizes Mérida and Yucatán, local people sometimes describe ‘Mexicans' as a people who demand to be treated as guests, but on their own terms, rather than adapting to the local code. Since this situation is lived as a form of cultural violence, the relationship between immigrants and local people is charged with tension, constituting a hostile context for intercultural negotiation.

       Food and Identity

      In 2003, a disquieting note appeared in a regional newspaper. It was revealed that a Japanese company had obtained legal, proprietary rights over the name cochinita pibil. Cochinita pibil is one of the iconic dishes by which Yucatecan gastronomy is recognized, not only within the Mexican territory, but also abroad (Ayora-Diaz 2010a). How could this have happened? What would the consequences be? Were Yucatecans to be forced to use a different denomination to name, sell, and purchase their own food—a food that they had created? Xenophobic invectives flew during conversations among friends. The commotion slowly turned into a subdued irritability when, in later days, follow-up articles modified the original information: the company was not Japanese, but a Mexican firm owned by a Mexican entrepreneur of Japanese origin. Another note relayed that the name that was legally protected was not cochinita pibil, but rather La Cochinita. Moreover, it was a restaurant chain specializing in pork recipes from different Mexican regions, and its menu included the Yucatecan cochinita pibil.20 Some people never saw the follow-up shorter notes that corrected the original misinformation, and years later people would still complain about the ‘Asian invasion' or the Mexican will to appropriate dishes that are tied to Yucatecan regional culture. This widespread moral panic highlights the affective attachment that Yucatecans display regarding regional culinary productions. Cochinita pibil, along with other regional dishes, is locally taken to be representative of a particular Yucatecan sensibility. For Yucatecans, it is undoubtedly a Yucatecan dish derived from a Yucatecan ‘tradition'.²¹ It is so much a part of their Yucatecan-ness that Yucatecans believe they are justified in being upset at the appropriations and transformations that the dish has suffered at the hands of Mexicans and other non-Yucatecans.

      In everyday life, the terms ‘Yucatecans' and ‘Mexicans' are often used as if they possess an objective content, that is, as if they reveal some ‘thing' about the identity (the nature, the essence) of a person, a group of people, a culture, or the food of a people. Many models and explanations of identity have been formulated in the social sciences and the humanities (Hall and du Gay 1996; Rajchman 1995; Ricoeur 1992). In anthropology, Geertz's (1973) discussion of the cognate concept of the ‘person' challenged the universality of its North Atlantic understanding, but continued to treat its different forms as the product of bounded cultures. Other anthropologists have also contributed to the relativization of ‘identity' and ‘person' (see, among others, Strathern 1991; Wagner 1991). Although it is a problematic term, social actors frequently use ‘identity' and identity-related concepts to define themselves, their social forms, and their cultural productions (as well as those of others with whom they engage). Identity politics imposes on the subjects the dichotomous logic of sameness/otherness. This logic, Lash (1999) has argued, commits difference to the margins. Hence, in contemporary identity rhetoric we find, on the one hand, that even if Mexico and Yucatán are both highly heterogeneous societies that encompass a diversity of cultures and social groups, they are often subsumed under a single identity term (‘Mexico', ‘Mexicans’) that silences cultural, economic, gender, political, religious, and other differences. On the other hand, when differences are recognized, they are reduced to ‘otherness' and are placed in a subordinate position to the identity of the group in power. In actual everyday practice, the boundaries among groups are more imprecise than these categories allow for, and those encompassed by a name, rather than a cohesive and harmonious collectivity, are frequently engaged in performative practices that challenge the legitimacy of homogeneous/hegemonic identities and subtly erode the groups from within (Ayora-Diaz 2003).

      Throughout this book, I often make reference to Yucatecan identity as something that individuals purposefully oppose to a national identity, although not necessarily in an instrumental way (many Yucatecans are convinced that a Yucatecan identity ‘truly' exists). I understand identities as socially and culturally constructed attributes or qualities that can have external and/or internal currency in the characterization of any individual or group. As Bhabha (1994) has argued, colonial and colonized groups of people engage in a process of subjectification whereby they appropriate attributes and characteristics to represent themselves, often fixing their own identity into cultural stereotypes. These stereotypes obscure the fact that the chosen identity-defining attributes are dynamic, context-dependent, and constantly changing. My analysis expands the anthropological critical understanding of local identities that began with Evans-Pritchard (1940) and was followed by Barth ([1969] 1998) and Herzfeld (1997), that is, that identities, despite their apparent fixity, need to be understood as situated and as changing according to the relationship of forces among different groups and in the context of their strategies of inclusion and exclusion (Appiah 2006; Bilgrami 2006). In the contemporary stage of cultural globalization, the identity of a person in modern societies has been thought of, and sometimes experienced, as one that has reached a high degree of structural coherence and temporal consistency (Giddens 1990, 1991; Ricoeur 1992).

      Since the advent of the post-Fordist mode of production and of postmodern consumption, identities have come to be lived and described as fragmentary, superficial, and fleeting—as simulacra of a ‘self’ embedded in a world of goods, information, and consumption (Gergen 1991; Jameson 1991). The linkage between consumption practices and the fashioning of transient individual and group identities has informed the argument that identities are as fleeting and superficial as the life of commodities in the market. In contrast, ethnic or national identities are understood and lived as being fixed and, at least in part, embedded in the goods that these individuals or groups produce and consume (Halter 2000; Mathews 2000). In the latter case, specific marked commodities anchor the identity of a group of people. From another point of view, group identities are understood as having been forged in the anvil of the market, be that of material goods, religions, or other forms of individual expression (Featherstone 1991; Friedman 1994; Hetherington 1998). From still another perspective, identities have come to be seen as politically imposed, giving grounds to the emergence of different identities and new social movements, including those positing regionalist and nationalist demands (Castells 1997; Escobar and Alvarez 1992; Foweraker 1995; Larraín Ibañez 2001). Despite their differences, I find that, in general, these various theoretical standpoints seem to accept that the affirmation of local identities is imbued with a high degree of instrumentality.

      Some authors have described ethnic and nationalist movements either as forms of instrumental identity formation (Esman 1994; Gellner 1983) or as pre-modern political forms that prefigure contemporary political movements (Hobsbawm 1990). Nonetheless, as anthropologists who understand that identities are fashioned and not given essences, we cannot ignore that individuals develop an affective attachment toward other people whom they see as sharing the same or a similar religion, language, skin color, territory, and political and social organization, and that they develop mechanisms to exclude individuals perceived as different from themselves. Privileging this experience, some have focused on what are called primordial attachments, naturalizing and producing understandings of ethnic, regional, and national identities as an essential attribute of a group of people (A. Smith 1983, 1999). I find that these models depend too much on the territoriality of a group to explain the foundation of different national quests. In the current historical moment of decolonization, cultural globalization, economic and military imperialism, post-national disintegration, and post-colonial developments, we can no longer base our understanding on localized cultures. Instead, I argue that we need to look at the processes of cultural exchange (more often, unequal) and the ways in which flows of people affect the societies that they leave behind and those where they arrive (Ayora-Diaz 2007a).

      The post-colonial order imposes on individuals the need to produce new forms of subjectivity, which they, in turn, derive from changed social, political, and cultural configurations. As M. Joseph (1999) suggests, displaced groups of people must negotiate and may СКАЧАТЬ