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PACIFIC ISLAND RESEARCH NETWORK (PIRN)
Feast and Famine: Exploring Relationships with Food in the Pacific
University College London (UCL), 7-8th September 2012
DAY 1 -Friday 7th September 2012
9.30- 10.00 Participants arrive and register
10.00-10.15 INTRODUCTION TO CONFERENCE (Kaori O’Connor and Sarah Byrne).
Session 1: Pacific Foodways Today
10.15-10:45 Samuel Haihuie, Open University, Papua New Guinea and Linus Di'igimrina
Pig-Killing and distribution as an arena of social construction
My indigenous name, Songorohuie, legitimizes my use of the clan land and resources above and
below it. All animate and inanimate objects such as the clan’s totemic symbols, space, plants, soil,
and land and marine organisms convey social meaning with “spiritual” values connected to land.
When my teacher asked for my name on my first day in school, my father replied ‘Samuel’. Then my
teacher asked for my surname. ‘Songorohuie’, my father answered. However, Wantoks who heard
him corrected in consistence with their understanding of the Western concept of surname. “That
child’s surname is your first name Haihuie”, they told him.
This ‘renaming story’ demonstrates (1) the emergence of simplistic problems from the intersection
of diverse ‘traditional’ forms of social organization in PNG societies and Westernized ‘ways of
knowing’, (2) variation in basic categories of social practices (in this case, social labeling), and (3)
difficulties surfacing from translating a cultural norm to another.
Accounts of indigenous communities in PNG vary. These tend to emphasize spiritual, ancestral,
relational, and cosmological connections to their knowledge. While traditional knowledge may be
acquired from a “teacher” and improved through experience, it ultimately can be derived through
direct communication with the abstract or “spirit world”. Melanesian worldviews, through
mythical creation and reciprocal relationship to the natural physical world, contrasts with scientific
ways and methodologies of interpreting and defining the lived world. In my society, delineation of
the rituals of pig-killing and the intricate division of parts of the pig during feasts illustrates these
contrasts.
Pig-cutting and its distribution and serves as a symbolic display of wealth, status, and informal power
relations. This ritual is the sole medium by which loyalty and alliances were negotiated, competition
was enacted, identity was created and consolidated, and public rituals that link the social and the
political including the sacred and the secular were practiced.
10.45-11.15 Kaori O’Connor, University College London
Pineapple and the Invention of ‘Polynesian’ Cuisine
This is an edible historical anthropology of ‘Polynesia’ and Hawaii, seen through changing cuisine and
a single non-indigenous fruit. On November 4, 1493, on his second voyage to the New World,
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Christopher Columbus came ashore on the newly-sighted Caribbean island he had just named Santa
Maria de Guadeloupe, and promptly ‘discovered’ the pineapple (ananas comosus). Taken to Europe
as royal gifts, pineapples became the fruit of kings, the most luxurious of edibles, celebrated in art
and literature, with fortunes spent on growing them in greenhouses. Pineapples were also taken
around the globe during the age of exploration, becoming naturalised in tropical zones and colonial
empires world-wide. Only one significant locale escaped the early spread of the pineapple – the
Hawaiian islands – which remained unknown to the West until 1778. Although Hawaii had the
perfect climate for the fruit, the large-scale introduction of pineapples and commercial growing did
not begin until the end of the 19th century. Within a few decades, the pineapple had thrown off its
South American origins and earlier elite European iconography to become the symbol of ‘Polynesia’
and the defining ingredient of ‘Polynesian’ cuisine. This paper examines the way in which the
fledgling Hawaiian tourist industry used the pineapple to promote a romantic vision of the Pacific
islands for visitors which also helped to sell Hawaiian canned pineapple around the world,
succeeding so well that even now anything called ‘Hawaiian’ is assumed to contain pineapple. At the
same time the increasingly multicultural population of Hawaii – many of whom had come from Asia
and elsewhere to work in the pineapple plantations – created their own pineapple dishes which
became part of ‘tiki’ cuisine and then the fusion cookery for which Hawaii is renowned. The
narrative of the pineapple in Hawaii shows what food can contribute to a nuanced understanding of
history, identity and popular culture in a dynamic and complex social environment, and also
demonstrates the power of invented culinary traditions.
11.15-11.45 – COFFEE BREAK
11.45-12.15
Andy Mills, University of East Anglia
Slow Manava: The Metaphysical Ins & Outs of Food Culture in Tonga
In 18th and early 19th Century Tonga, eating, digestion, defecation and the control of food had a
strong relationship with the key cultural concepts of mana, tapu and chieflyness ('eiki). This paper
will explore the nature of that relationship by examining ethnohistorical descriptions of
commensality, ritual practices, food prohibitions, fishing and farming practices, and the circulation of
foodstuffs. This broadly cast net will allow us to haul in a novel reconstruction of pre- Christian
embodiment and metaphysics in Tonga that elicits the cohesive rationality underlying a disparate
and seemingly unconnected set of cultural phenomena. It also highlights some of the cultural
preconditions of Tongan food culture that collided catastrophically with the Western culture of fast
food and processed carbohydrates during the 20th Century, to make Tonga the most obese nation on
earth.
12.15-12.45: DISCUSSION
12.45-2.00: LUNCH
Session 2: Food as Technology and Process
2.00-2.30 Ludovic Coupaye, University College London
Eating Sociology? Tubers as paradigms among the Abelam of Papua New Guinea (and beyond ?)
This paper elaborates on the position of tubers agriculture in PNG and Melanesia systems of
thought. Using the case of the Abelam of the East Sepik Province, that are displayed during specific
ceremonies, I will investigate whether the trans-Melanesian custom of displaying cultivated tubers
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suggests that this particular type of plant is used by indigenous communities to think through social
life – and social relations. But instead of being simply a form of local hermeneutics, I suggest that it is
the very properties of the plant (as non-human entity and as food), made visible through processes
of cultivation, that are considered as particularly relevant for thinking, discussing and showing what
sociality is about. Still based on hypotheses at this stage, the paper aims to outline future avenues
for field research.
2.30-3.00
Yoko Nojima, International Research Centre for Japanese Studies, Kyoto
Technological styles of cooking and feast food: the case of Northern Vanuatu
While cooking technologies are viewed as an extension of subsistence activities reflecting ecological
background, they are complex cultural processes. Following the anthropology of technology
framework, the diversity of cooking practices in northern Vanuatu is explored by focusing on two
aspects: 1) stone oven cooking strategies, and 2) the feast food known as laplap and nalot, or
“pudding”-like dishes processed by grating or pounding crops. These aspects, typifying culinary
practices in the Pacific, have been developed in many sophisticated ways as basic tools for
processing foods of the people living on the island. Northern Vanuatu cases displaying the diversity
of cooking styles enables detailed examinations of how cooking designs and technological styles are
organized. On the one hand, cooking styles including the cooking device, operation, and varieties of
dishes reflect economic and social importance of certain crop species. On the other, specific
techniques are chosen more for their sociocultural values rather than practicality or efficiency, and
such cultural needs conversely reinforce the selection and use of particular varieties of food. In
northern Vanuatu where local societies are small and largely tribal, cooking styles designating
cultural identity functions as an effective means of maintaining and reproducing social relations
within and between groups.
3.00-3.30 Marie Durand, University of East Anglia
Eating for the House: Technical processes of food production, social efficacy and gender in the
context of house building on Mere Lava, Vanuatu (TBC)
In Vanuatu, as elsewhere in the Pacific, food production, food sharing and distribution pervades
people's lives in an important way. From the cradle to the grave, and from the garden to the plate,
food appears as an efficacious item through which people appraise and negotiate their social, spatial
and temporal environment. The characteristics of food, as items that possess the abilities to cross
the permeable boundaries of bodies, and eventually contribute to their transformations, have
indeed been largely studied in the Pacific. The close connection between food and gender has
notably been examined through the lens of substance, fertility, gender construction and hierarchical
domination of men over women. Similarly, houses have been acknowledged as crucial loci for the
constitution of persons and the negotiation of gendered relationships.
This paper, based on data gathered in 2010-2011 on the island of Mere Lava in the northern part of
the Vanuatu archipelago, will draw upon an overview of the technical operations leading to the
production, distribution and consumption of food in the context of kitchen houses. As such, it aims
to highlight in a processual way how food as material culture interacts with, and at the same time
constitutes, gendered persons and spaces such as houses, which on Mere Lava appear as privileged
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constructions in terms of social efficacy and materialization of conceptual ideas linked to space and
time.
3.30-4.00 COFFEE BREAK
4:00- 4:30 Maëlle Calandra, EHESS-CREDO
Nourishing gardens facing catastrophe
On Tanna Island, Vanuatu (in Lamlu, a central bush village), a “disaster” is measured and defined
only according to the damage caused to the crops. Subsistence horticulture has always been central
to this community, and the gardens where this is practiced are crucial for the local people. Their
balance however can be disrupted, or altogether wiped out, by frequent cyclical and life-threatening
events (cyclones, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, acid rains, etc.), which can jeopardize farming. To
ensure prosperity and fertility within the gardens, agricultural magicians, called Tapunis, act in very
specific ways and at very specific times under the authority of customary hierarchy (Descola 1986;
Godelier 1972; Malinowski 1965). In order to protect these places, the Tapunis supervise the tubers
from germination to harvest; they play a major role, and without their assistance, nothing would
grow. When carried out efficiently, ceremonies such as Niel or Toka are held: large quantities of food
are exchanged, and many pigs are slaughtered – a reminder of the tribal wars during which alliances
between clans were formed and maintained. These ceremonies also protect the gardens from black
magic. In this paper I will present and analyse these operational sequences: practical agricultural,
exchanges and magic.
4.30-5:00 DISCUSSION
5:00-8.00 DRINKS AND LUAU PARTY
DAY 2 SATURDAY 8TH SEPTEMBER 2012
SESSION 3: LANDSCAPES OF FEASTING
9.30- 10.00
Jim Specht, Australian Museum, Sydney; Carol Lentfer, The University of
Queensland, Brisbane, Peter Matthews, The National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, Japan.
Feasting in a nutshell? Reflections of past social practices in Island Melanesia
Within the present-day western Pacific Islands, feast can be small affairs or large gatherings that
celebrate, among other things, the various stages of life and death. To date, however, they have
received almost no attention by archaeologists, whose efforts have largely aimed to define the
frameworks of local and regional prehistories. Swadling (2004; Swadling and Hide 2005) has
speculated on the role of stone bowls in the production of ceremonial taro puddings, and Torrence
(2011) links special obsidian artefact forms with status-achieving practices in the middle and late
Holocene. Neither explicitly addresses the issue of feasting and its history. We offer, therefore, an
exploratory approach to the archaeology of feasting in the Papua New Guinea-Solomon Islands
region. We draw upon archaeological, archaeobotanical and ethnographic data on the use of edible
nuts, the macro-remains of which survive well in many archaeological contexts compared to the
foods usually associated with feasting. Our preliminary conclusions suggest that feasting may have
contributed to important developments in the development and distribution of certain nut-bearing
trees, possibly from the middle Holocene onwards.
10.00-10.30
Sue Hamilton, University College London
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Chasing chickens: feasting, food ritual and food deprivation on prehistoric and proto-historic Rapa
Nui (Easter Island)
There has been little consideration of the social context of Rapa Nui’s prehistoric and proto-historic
food traditions. Monumental stone construction by the early inhabitants of Rapa Nui, including
statue production, centred on the period AD 1200-1600 and the foodstuffs that fuelled these
activities included fish – possibly an early food under elite control, rats, chickens, bird eggs and
tubers. Rectangular, flat-topped stone-build structures, named hare moa, are numerous monuments
on the island. Those with low, side openings have been interpreted as protected chicken coops or
tuber stores and those without entrances have been interpreted as tombs. While the use of hare
moa may have changed through time, they contribute to the idea that chicken husbandry had an
elevated status by the end of the statue building period and subsequently. Chickens were brought to
Rapa Nui, accompanied by the Polynesian rat, in the canoes of the original Polynesian colonisers.
Rapa Nui’s very limited biodiversity and great isolation made its food resources particularly
vulnerable to environmental and socio-economic changes. With the loss of trees and therefore wood
for the canoes that allowed access to sea resources, fish bones dwindle in the archaeological record
and chicken bones became increasingly recurrent. In the context of Rapa Nui’s lack of large
invertebrate fauna – introduced and native, intensified poultry husbandry is suggested to have
become analogous to Polynesian pig-raising in its ultimate socio-economic and ritual connotations.
Ethnographically, the ideological importance of the chicken in Rapa Nui is evident in the use of
chicken feathers in costumes - particularly the strategic use of black and red cockerel feathers, the
occasional depiction of cockerels in petroglyphs, the ceremonial role of the umu- (hot stone and
earth oven) cooked chicken, and the importance of the smell of cooking chicken to placate the
spirits. This paper explores the socio-economic and symbolic role of the chicken in feasting, food
ritual and food crisis in later prehistoric and protohistoric Rapa Nui.
10:30-11.00 COFFEE BREAK
11.00-11.30
Jocelyne Dudding, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of
Cambridge
Hereanee, Whatta; Duludulumata, Nevsem, Haraki Stages, et al- Is there a Pacific Connection to
Feasting Platforms?
John Webber drew a hereanee in January 1778 when he visited Atooi in the Sandwich Islands during
Cook’s third Pacific voyage. James Cook then compares this to the Whatta he had seen previously in
Otaheite. In 1817 William Mariner writes of attending a ceremony in Tonga to annul eight months
of taboo, for which four columns reaching the height of 50-60 ft high were filled with yams and
topped off by a cold baked pig. In 1898, Alfred Cort Haddon photographed a Kaketut on Mer, Torres
Strait, in which food was piled high in three bamboo crates. Elsdon Best in 1916 provides
construction details of Maori Haraki stages that were built for ceremonial feasts for up to six
thousand guests. In 1980 a duludulumata was constructed in Rewa, Fiji, but collapsed under high
winds. And in 2003, elders of Erromango made a plea for a workshop to gather information so that
the nevsem could be revived.
These feasting stages or pyramids transmit time and space across the Pacific, yet little has been
written about them. This presentation is a visual exploration into whether there is any connection,
either contact, migration, or diffusionism, between these platforms.
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11:30-12.00- DISCUSSION
SESSION 4: FOOD AND EXCHANGE
12.00-12.30
Sarah Byrne, University College London
Pudding Politics: Banks Islands' Museum Collections Reconsidered
Museums invest much of their energy identifying, researching and displaying their 'star' objects yet
it is the more commonplace and numerous collections that often provide more in-depth insights in
the social conditions in which such collections were 'made'. A recent survey of collections from the
Banks Islands, Vanuatu in UK museums has revealed that pudding knives far outnumber all other
categories of objects. These commonplace traces demand our attention. The majority of these
knives were collected by or gifted to the Melanesian Mission in the late 19th century/ early 20th
century. BanksIslands pudding knives come in a wide range of anthropomorphic, geometric and
plain varieties, and were traditionally used to portion out and serve nalot pudding, central within the
process of Suque rank-taking ceremonies. These knives are loaded with significance, manifesting and
communicating different aspects of rank within the Suque. Their appearance in such great numbers
not only prompts a consideration of the intentionality behind their trade and exchange but also how
local and inter-cultural food relations influenced, framed and instigated what knives appear in
museum collections today. In this paper I consider the legacy of these pudding knives and also argue
that food relations should assume a more central place in our attempts to understand the trade and
exchange of Pacific Island material culture more generally.
12.30-1.00
Matti Eräsaari, University of Helsinki, Finland-
Ceremonial Chop Suey and Value Shift in Fiji
Relations between indigenes and people categorised as “strangers” are a recurring theme in Oceanic
ethnography, particularly when dealing with exchanges and political organisation. In Fiji, historical
documents indicate that notions of value tended to correlate with this distinction: the exchange
value of objects increased with foreign association just like political power coincided with foreign
origin, producing a dichotomy wherein people and things could be divided into the categories of
“land” and “sea”, “autochthones” and “guests”, or even “commoners” and “chiefs” in a dual pattern
made famous through the work of A.M. Hocart, Marshall Sahlins, Christina Toren and many others.
My own data, collected in a Verata village in Fiji, shows a reversal of the paramount value: no-one
actually wants to be regarded as a “stranger” anymore. This is reflected in present-day origin myths,
valuables, the hierarchical superiority of the “land people” – and in food exchanges. Not only have
most people discarded the food taboos related to the distinction between two “kinds” of people,
they have also replaced the corresponding food exchanges, made in pigs and fish, with beef. Hence
the quintessential feast food in present-day Fiji, beef chop suey, stands for a value shift that extends
from relations between people to cosmology.
1.00-2.00 LUNCH
2.00-2.30 Sophie Forgan, Captain Cook Memorial Museum, Whitby.
Eating the Exotic: food on the voyages of Captain Cook: creating an exhibition on historic food
cultures of the Pacific
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In 2011 the Captain Cook Museum decided to mount two linked exhibitions on food in the voyages
of Captain Cook. It was felt that food provided a novel and accessible angle on the voyages. The
first exhibition dealt with the supplies carried on board ship, and the second (in 2012) deals with the
foods found in Tahiti, Tonga and New Zealand.
While there is much writing in the voyage journals about food and a large number of original
artefacts survive in various museum collections, a number of questions emerged. First, the nature of
the surviving artefacts, such as numerous fish-hooks, together with paintings produced by artists on
the voyages, tended to over-emphasise the consumption of fish. Second, while there was evidence
of function and specialisation in the artefacts, it was difficult, for example, to match up hooks with
particular types of fish. The evidence of the voyagers could be unclear or contradictory, though
illuminating about their reactions to a very different diet and manner of consumption. One feature
however which emerged was the extent to which Cook carried European seeds with him and planted
‘useful plants’ wherever he could. The paper will briefly outline the development of the exhibition
themes and the way in which they were translated into visual displays.
2.30-3.00 DISCUSSION
3.00-3.30 COFFEE BREAK
SESSION 5: FOOD, HEALTH AND EMBODIMENT
3.30-4.00
Ulf Dahre, Lund University, Sweden.
SPAM-a lot- Food as political resistance-Why SPAM is not (all) un-healthy food?
Hawaiians are the leading consumers of SPAM, the canned meat product, in the world. Why is it that
people in a place with an abundance of fresh food so happily and often consume this meat product,
by many considered being the definition of junk-food? It is not because it’s cheaper than fresh food.
This paper tries to challenge our common-sense idea of food in these times of discussions on healthfood. Food is not, or at least not only, about nutrition. I will argue that there is a close and important
relationship between Hawaiians, political history and food that explains why Hawaiians indulge into
the varieties of SPAM dishes, a menu many of us have come know thru the now classical Monty
Python sketch on the Vikings eating all possible SPAM delicacies.
Hawaiians have a history of political resistance. They killed Captain Cook; they tried to resist
missionaries; they resisted, unsuccessfully though, American take-over in the 1890s; and now they
resist American political and cultural hegemony by using one of the hallmarks of American food
culture. Hawaiians are aware that SPAM is not considered to be a health-product, and they can
afford other foods, but they consider it to be healthy for the native Hawaiian nation to consume this
product because American discourse, despite SPAM being originally an American product, argues
that SPAM is a major cause of diabetes and other diseases among Hawaiians. SPAM has become a
means, among many, of contemporary political resistance for Hawaiians.
This paper is based on several years of fieldwork and participatory consumption of SPAM in the
Hawaiian Islands.
4.00-4.30 Chelsea Wentworth, University of Pittsburgh (tbc)
Food Insecurity that Feeds Feasting: Children’s Foodways in Vanuatu
The Pacific island nation Vanuatu is experiencing high rates of childhood malnutrition. Recent
research proposes that biomedical measures of malnutrition indicate exposure to longer periods of
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food insecurity at the household level. In an attempt to ease this burden, children forage and
augment their diet from sources outside the home. By defining feasting as the consumption of large
quantities of food, indulgence in calorie rich food, or both, this paper examines how feasting
becomes an avenue for reducing the burden of food insecurity. Based on participant observation
and ethnographic interviews conducted in 2010 and 2012 in Vanuatu, my research illustrates how
food insecurity enables feasting. I argue that food insecurity loosens parent’s control over their
children’s food intake, enabling children to seek copious amounts of food and foods possessing high
social and caloric values from sources outside the home. Data presented here demonstrate the
importance of interdisciplinary perspectives conjoining anthropological, biomedical and public
health research to better address the challenges presented in the study of food insecurity and
feasting. Results implicate a significant relationship between the seemingly disparate phenomenon
of feasting and food insecurity, which calls for a re-examination of the role of feasting in the study of
malnutrition.
4.30-5.00 Amy McLennan- University of Oxford
Preserve or feast, save or spend? Rhythms of eating in the Republic of Nauru
In this paper, I explore the tension that exists between consuming and preserving food in the
Republic of Nauru. While eating and feasting are significant practices in Nauru, in the past the
seasonal preservation of pandanus fruit was also a central part of life. Colonial influence,
unprecedented economic growth resulting from lucrative phosphate mining, and political
independence shaped a new ecology in which food preservation was no longer practiced. From this
same ecology also emerged one of the highest rates of population obesity in the world. My work is
situated at the intersection of biocultural and critical medical anthropologies; in it, I draw on
participant observation and life-history interviews carried out during 2010-11, as well as historical
ethnographic accounts and dietary surveys. The feast/preserve tension is commonly framed in
biocultural anthropology as short-term satisfaction of desire versus long-term rational saving that
can mitigate ecological uncertainty. However, critical medical anthropology has the potential to offer
an alternative perspective. I apply both of these perspectives to the Nauruan case to explore the
links between the changing feast/preserve tension, social life, and population health.
5.00-5.30 Wrap up, discussion of PIRN and book proposal.
Contact:
Dr Sarah Byrne ([email protected])
Dr Kaori O’Connor ([email protected])