Download In an attempt to make sense out of the array of food customs that

In an attempt to make sense out of the array of food customs that have been documented in both ancient and modern societies at
all stages of their development, scholars have traveled many different roads seeking common elements that would justify the
organization of food customs into intelligible categories. For example, writers since Moses Maimonides (d. 1204) have suggested
that hygiene motivated the Jewish food taboos. Maimonides said that pork contained too much moisture and so caused indigestion
and denounced the filthiness of pigs; moderns have pointed to the danger of trichinosis from undercooked pork. The facts that
parasitic diseases were not recognized until the nineteenth century and that permitted foods may also bear disease work against
this perspective, though the experience of consequences as a factor in food taboos also forms part of an evolutionary perspective
that could have some validity. Psychoanalytic explanations for food customs have begun from the infant–mother bond in nursing
and the instinctual relations that this may establish between eating and sex. Many cultures, from the Lele of West Africa to modern
Orthodox Jews, have forbidden women from cooking during menstruation; the Bemba of central Africa keep children from eating
food prepared by those who have not purified themselves by a ritual after sex. Perhaps the command of the Torah not to boil a kid
in its mother’s milk arose in order to forbid a kind of culinary incest that Canaanites practiced to promote fertility. Japanese menus
still offer a “motherchild udon,” or bowl of noodles that contains both chicken and egg, and the title still makes some diners cringe.
Seeking a psychological root for food rules in the realms of cognition and linguistics, Claude Lévi-Strauss proposed that all thought
and language begins with binary oppositions such as self/other, human/animal, and nature/culture. In the domain of food, objects
are classified according to the binary of cooked/rotten, between which the midpoint is raw. Lévi-Strauss classified the processes of
food preparation, beginning with roasting, boiling, and smoking, along the continuum between cooked and rotten. He concluded
that roasted food remained most similar to the raw and therefore was understood as possessing the most natural strength and
prestige, while boiled food stood closer to rotten, weaker but more civilized, because boiling required a pot rather than a spit, and
also more closely associated with rebirth (as in the cauldron of immortality that appears in many cultures). Lévi-Strauss thought that
processes like frying, baking, and smoking, with variation depending on oils and spices, could be located along the same continuum
between cooked and rotten in every civilization. Abandoning the quest for universal systems, such functional anthropologists as A.
R. Radcliffe-Brown, Bronislaw Malinowski, and Franz Boas have emphasized that every social group must be understood on its own
terms, and that food forms part of a system that both expresses and reinforces the roles people play in helping the group to
function. For example, they would say women who contribute large dowries and exercise authority tend to eat with men of the
same social status and to eat the same foods, while women in polygamous families who exercise no authority eat with the children
and eat different foods. From this perspective, taboos on menstruating women preparing food arise from the definition of women
by their availability for sex and for childbirth. Taboos on specific foods may reflect the low status (or the status as enemies) of
people who possess that food. Anthropologists have also observed symbolic uses of food that seem suitable to societies at various
levels of social and technological development. Research has revealed, for example, that hunter-gatherer societies have much in
common, whether they live in desert regions, the Arctic, India, or Africa. According to Joseph Campbell, one of the earliest analysts
of world mythologies, hunter-gatherers tend to address prayer and sacrifice to a cosmic force (or a god) that stands apart, acting as
master of the game animals. Campbell went on to say that when a group takes up agriculture, rituals and myths appear in which the
cosmic force or god dwells within the object sacrificed, so that the sacrifice brings forth its own effects. The development of large
communities with formal political authority brings another stage, at which large festivals and more serious sacrifice (often
demanding human victims) begins to be seen as necessary to renew the supply of food each year. The human sacrifices of ancient
China before the Shang dynasty, of ancient Rome in the arenas, and of the Incas and Aztecs in America lend some plausibility to this
view.
Summary
In a paragraph of about 200 words, summarize the main points of the article. Please, write legibly. You may wish to use the prompts
to help you.
Prompts to help you:
Look again at your summary and decide whether you wish to change anything.
Is anything irrelevant included? Or anything relevant missing?
Now check for language mistakes. Correct them.
Is the summary well organized and does it make sense throughout?
Have any parts of the text simply been copied in the summary?
Now in a few words, yet succinctly, answer the following questions. Your answers should be based entirely on the text. Write
your answers in the clean copy (violet paper) directly.
1. What do all language and thought begin with according to Lévi-Strauss?
2. Why is the boiled food closely associated with the idea of immortality according to Lévi-Strauss?
3. What is the role of food in a social group according to functional anthropologists?