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Postscript. Globalizing South Asian Food Cultures: Earlier Stops to New Horizons

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Curried Cultures
This chapter is in the book Curried Cultures
237PostscriptGlobalizing South Asian Food CulturesEarlier Stops to New HorizonsR. S. KhareThe anthropological study of human food systems, although carried out since the beginning of the field, is becoming an important subfield and is proving “valuable for debating and advancing anthropological theory and research methods” (Mintz & Du Bois 2002: 99; also Messer 1984: 205–249). This postscript cannot be comprehensive, so it will focus on a few trajectories in anthropological food studies that will help us connect a much longer tradi-tion to the current iteration of South Asian “curried cultures,” as currently imagined by the urban, middle-class Indians at home and in the diaspora. In such a pursuit, the anthropological approach is helpful, although in it the food has been often considered only as “an instrument for the study of other things. . . . It was not the food or its preparation that was of interest, so much as what, socially speaking, the food and eating could be used for” (Mintz 1996: 3–4; J. [Jack] Goody 1982; also see below).However, for about thirty years, anthropology has comprehensively stud-ied food, underscoring its ecological variability and material/caloric function as much as its highly valued religious-cultural-symbolic variability and signif-icance (see Harris 1985; Douglas 1984a; Mintz 1996: 1–32). By the seventies, in the United States, the anthropology of food and nutrition was recognized as a disciplinary subfield by the American Anthropological Association (see Mead 1943; on nutritional anthropology, see Fitzgerald 1977; and Jerome, Kandel & Pelto 1980). Lately, as this volume illustrates, distinct new trans-national food marketing and consumption models and their related global cultural and communicational structures have appeared. To view foods and foodways in these ways is also to avoid, both in theory and practice, treating segments of the subject for the whole. If this means including hunger or, in Mintz’s terms, “our ‘animal’ need to eat” (1996: 6), then it also now means
© 2019 University of California Press, Berkeley

237PostscriptGlobalizing South Asian Food CulturesEarlier Stops to New HorizonsR. S. KhareThe anthropological study of human food systems, although carried out since the beginning of the field, is becoming an important subfield and is proving “valuable for debating and advancing anthropological theory and research methods” (Mintz & Du Bois 2002: 99; also Messer 1984: 205–249). This postscript cannot be comprehensive, so it will focus on a few trajectories in anthropological food studies that will help us connect a much longer tradi-tion to the current iteration of South Asian “curried cultures,” as currently imagined by the urban, middle-class Indians at home and in the diaspora. In such a pursuit, the anthropological approach is helpful, although in it the food has been often considered only as “an instrument for the study of other things. . . . It was not the food or its preparation that was of interest, so much as what, socially speaking, the food and eating could be used for” (Mintz 1996: 3–4; J. [Jack] Goody 1982; also see below).However, for about thirty years, anthropology has comprehensively stud-ied food, underscoring its ecological variability and material/caloric function as much as its highly valued religious-cultural-symbolic variability and signif-icance (see Harris 1985; Douglas 1984a; Mintz 1996: 1–32). By the seventies, in the United States, the anthropology of food and nutrition was recognized as a disciplinary subfield by the American Anthropological Association (see Mead 1943; on nutritional anthropology, see Fitzgerald 1977; and Jerome, Kandel & Pelto 1980). Lately, as this volume illustrates, distinct new trans-national food marketing and consumption models and their related global cultural and communicational structures have appeared. To view foods and foodways in these ways is also to avoid, both in theory and practice, treating segments of the subject for the whole. If this means including hunger or, in Mintz’s terms, “our ‘animal’ need to eat” (1996: 6), then it also now means
© 2019 University of California Press, Berkeley

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter i
  2. Contents vii
  3. Part One. Opening the Issues
  4. 1. Introduction 3
  5. 2. A Different History of the Present: The Movement of Crops, Cuisines, and Globalization 29
  6. Part Two. The Princely-Colonial Encounter and the Nationalist Response
  7. 3. Cosmopolitan Kitchens: Cooking for Princely Zenanas in Late Colonial India 49
  8. 4. Nation on a Platter: The Culture and Politics of Food and Cuisine in Colonial Bengal 73
  9. Part Three. Cities, Middle Classes, and Public Cultures of Eating
  10. 5. Udupi Hotels: Entrepreneurship, Reform, and Revival 91
  11. 6. Dum Pukht: A Pseudo-Historical Cuisine 110
  12. 7. “Teaching Modern India How to Eat”: “Authentic” Foodways and Regimes of Exclusion in Affluent Mumbai 126
  13. 8. “Going for an Indian”: South Asian Restaurants and the Limits of Multiculturalism in Britain 143
  14. 9. Global Flows, Local Bodies: Dreams of Pakistani Grill in Manhattan 175
  15. 10. From Curry Mahals to Chaat Cafés: Spatialities of the South Asian Culinary Landscape 196
  16. 11. Masala Matters: Globalization, Female Food Entrepreneurs, and the Changing Politics of Provisioning 219
  17. Postscript. Globalizing South Asian Food Cultures: Earlier Stops to New Horizons 237
  18. References 255
  19. Contributors 299
  20. Index 303
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https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520952249-012

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter i
  2. Contents vii
  3. Part One. Opening the Issues
  4. 1. Introduction 3
  5. 2. A Different History of the Present: The Movement of Crops, Cuisines, and Globalization 29
  6. Part Two. The Princely-Colonial Encounter and the Nationalist Response
  7. 3. Cosmopolitan Kitchens: Cooking for Princely Zenanas in Late Colonial India 49
  8. 4. Nation on a Platter: The Culture and Politics of Food and Cuisine in Colonial Bengal 73
  9. Part Three. Cities, Middle Classes, and Public Cultures of Eating
  10. 5. Udupi Hotels: Entrepreneurship, Reform, and Revival 91
  11. 6. Dum Pukht: A Pseudo-Historical Cuisine 110
  12. 7. “Teaching Modern India How to Eat”: “Authentic” Foodways and Regimes of Exclusion in Affluent Mumbai 126
  13. 8. “Going for an Indian”: South Asian Restaurants and the Limits of Multiculturalism in Britain 143
  14. 9. Global Flows, Local Bodies: Dreams of Pakistani Grill in Manhattan 175
  15. 10. From Curry Mahals to Chaat Cafés: Spatialities of the South Asian Culinary Landscape 196
  16. 11. Masala Matters: Globalization, Female Food Entrepreneurs, and the Changing Politics of Provisioning 219
  17. Postscript. Globalizing South Asian Food Cultures: Earlier Stops to New Horizons 237
  18. References 255
  19. Contributors 299
  20. Index 303
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