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- Convenors:
-
Sean Wyer
(University of Oxford)
Margaret Neil (University of Oxford)
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- Chairs:
-
Sean Wyer
(University of Oxford)
Margaret Neil (University of Oxford)
- Discussants:
-
Sean Wyer
(University of Oxford)
Margaret Neil (University of Oxford)
- Format:
- Panel
- Transfers:
- Open for transfers
Short Abstract:
Culinary tourism raises political and ethical issues that merit anthropological attention. Is it a form of “food colonialism” (Heldke 2003), or can it benefit food producers? How does a site and its cuisine become “destination-worthy” (Kennedy 2023), and what are the effects of this on a locality?
Long Abstract:
Culinary tourism, “the intentional exploratory participation in the foodways of another” (Long 2004), is a fruitful object for ethnographic research, and a paradigmatic example of “anthropology on the move”. It is a topic where two longstanding objects of anthropological study – hospitality and eating – converge. Culinary tourism is growing in an age of mass tourism and “foodies”: “well-informed, discovery-minded, discerning consumers [...] who lead food-focused lives” (Johnston and Baumann 2010). For culinary tourists, food is not incidental to the act of travelling, but a primary motivation. Both eating and travelling are regarded as vehicles for transformation.
An anthropological approach can shed light on central political and ethical issues raised by culinary tourism. How does a site, and its cuisine, become “destination-worthy” (Kennedy 2023), and how can we evaluate the repercussions of this process on a locality? Is an “obsessive interest in [...] the new, the obscure and the exotic” a form of “food colonialism” (Heldke 2003), reproducing and reifying existing hierarchies, or does it produce an industry that benefits food producers? Might it in some instances do both?
Can culinary tourism enable conversations over food, and if so, what kinds of conversations does it facilitate in practice? While philosophical and economic analyses of this phenomenon are valuable, an ethnographic approach has the advantage of centering protagonists in this system: growers, cooks, entrepreneurs, and culinary tourists themselves. Like anthropologies of food more broadly, the anthropology of culinary tourism can tell stories that other methodologies risk leaving untold (Ray 2016).
Accepted papers:
Paper short abstract:
Since its UNESCO recognition, traditional Mexican cuisine has been a tourism resource, yet it has changed social dynamics, meanings, and practices. Ethnographic analysis highlights cultural commodification, questioning if safeguarding efforts compromise local culinary autonomy for tourism.
Paper long abstract:
Since its inclusion in UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity , traditional Mexican cuisine has become a resource for attracting tourists to Mexico. However, this recognition has also modified the social dynamics, relationships, practices, and meanings among the agents involved in traditional cuisine, as well as the narratives that stem from it. The designation has also resulted in fairs, exhibitions, meetings, and culinary festivals, with the stated aim of ensuring safeguarding frameworks, but whose secondary objective has been to promote traditional cuisine as a tourist attraction, often with State support.
This presentation offers an analysis based on an ethnographic approach, ensuing from my participation at the National Meetings of Traditional Mexican Cuisine, and the World Forums on Mexican Gastronomy between 2017 and 2023, as both as an attendee and a delegate of the Mexican Conservatory of Gastronomic Culture. From the perspective of critical heritage studies, this paper discusses cultural homogenization, power relations, and the spectacularization of culinary practices as forms of cultural control observed in these events. I argue that, while UNESCO’s designation aims to ensure the welfare of and respect towards the agents and environments where traditional cuisine is performed, the frameworks established for safeguarding put into question the culinary autonomy of the local communities . Those very frameworks channel traditional Mexican cuisine under a commercial logic of expression and performance geared towards tourism, which means that cuisine is being used for its commercial value , at the expense of its cultural and social significance.
Paper short abstract:
By tracing how broad-scale processes of global-local mobilities shape and are shaped by rural-urban imaginaries, this paper investigates the role of food tourism in reifying fixed, static images of rural foods, rural places and by extension, rural people.
Paper long abstract:
Akita, Japan is known (mostly to domestic tourists) for rice and for snow. Akita’s tourism website contains various images and links to foods and experiences that are ‘local’, ‘authentic’ or can only be found in Akita. European or American tourists looking to embark on a ‘real’ tour of Japan seek out small towns in Akita - Oga, Kakunodate - towns that market themselves as offering intimate and authentic experiences of rural Japan. By tracing how broad-scale processes of global-local mobilities shape and are shaped by rural-urban imaginaries, this paper investigates the role of food tourism in reifying fixed, static images of rural foods, rural places and by extension, rural people. By looking at ethnographic vignettes around the historical and contemporary preparation of food as well as local relationships to ‘Akita foods’, this paper challenges the associations between place, locality and authenticity. It asks: What does it mean to have local foods that can be reproduced outside of a particular locality? Are foods commodities that actually need to be eaten to be associated as being from a particular place? Are ‘local’ foods real or imagined foods and what are their relationships to real or imagined places?
Paper short abstract:
This paper presents Bois Chéri Tea Plantation in Mauritius as a site of labour and leisure. Through the lens of plantation labour I analyze how colonial histo works to simultaneously obscure and reproduce social inequality amongst those responsible for creating the tourist gaze.
Paper long abstract:
John Urry (2002) described the tourist gaze as a way of seeing which separates tourist experience from the reality of everyday experience but these collide when labour and leisure meet in the same place. In Assam tourists pay large sums of money traveling to remote towns to learn how to pick tea leaves in locally or nationally owned ‘gardens’ alongside local women. Agro-tourism is defined as “the economic multidimensional development of agricultural farms and multidimensional development of rural areas” (Zoto et al., 2013: 210) and agricultural production is the main source of income. After independence Bois Chéri Tea Plantation gained a new life - an afterlife - as a ‘historical’ site of tourism and labour and, as a modern space of luxury and opulence. Using qualitative research methods and an immersive ethnographic approach over 9-months in Bois Chéri Tea Plantation I studied the tea plantation tourism through the lives and living conditions of labourers wondering what recursive elements of colonial imagination and history are found in places where we go to, to “escape”, to relax, to live in tranquil, serene and enclosed environments’ (Trouillo, 1995)? This led me to ask, what does tea plantation tourism obscure, silence and reflect and what effect does that have on lives of those responsible for creating the ‘tourist gaze’? It’s important to know how the history of slavery and colonialism continues to simultaneously reproduce and obscure social and economic disparity through modern policies and practices in the agro-tourism industry.
Paper short abstract:
Growing global fame of Istrian olive oil is helping transform the region into an elite, gastronomic and Mediterranean tourism destination. This symbolic and material taste- and place-making brings significant commercial and political opportunities, yet also risks, tensions and exclusions for some.
Paper long abstract:
The recent success of Istrian olive oils within international competitions is helping (re-)make the region of Croatian Istria as an elite, gastronomic and Mediterranean tourism destination. This paper takes an anthropological approach to examining these processes and their impact, paying ethnographic attention to the experiences of resident producers and consumers. It demonstrates how global recognition interacts with local processes to shape both taste and place, with mixed consequences.
To compete within global hierarchies of value (Herzfeld 2004) in which the Mediterranean, specifically Tuscany, ranks highly as both place and taste, requires a “re-qualification” of Istrian olive oil. The paper outlines these changes to the production, meaning, use, taste and evaluation of Istrian olive oil, including how producers, chefs and other consumers are taught to judge and appreciate olive oil in new ways.
The paper then examines how the re-qualification of Istrian olive oil feeds into political and commercial strategies to construct Istria in ways which suit dominant regionalist and tourism agenda—in sum, becoming “the new Tuscany”. This taste- and place-making involve a series of hierarchies—olive oil over lard, Mediterranean over Balkan, coast over interior—and stratifies Istrian olive oils, their producers and consumers.
With ethnographic attention to the perspectives of several oil producers and other local actors, I therefore argue that while the political and commercial opportunities are attractive and beneficial for many, becoming “the new Tuscany” also brings risks, tensions and exclusions which are obscured by the fanfare surrounding olive oil and associated gastronomic tourism.
Paper short abstract:
As an UNESCO City of Gastronomy, Macao transforms its unique culinary hybridity into a global narrative. This talk explores how Macao's food attractions and festivals drive post-pandemic tourism recovery, cultural identity and China's soft power.
Paper long abstract:
Macao’s enclave was handed over to China in 1999 and established as Special Administrative Region. Since then, it has been one of the cities in the world with the highest income generated by the tourism sector.
Macao’s tourism promotion and its identity construction is based on an East-West cultural hybridity, which has led to UNESCO’s recognition as tangible and intangible world heritage, and to a destination where gastronomy shines bright. Its culinary potential for intercultural dialogue, commodification of Portuguese iconic food (egg-tarts, sardines, etc.), and the creation of fusion cuisines, like the secular Macanese cuisine (which preserves ancient Portuguese culinary traditions mixed with Cantonese and other Asian and even African cuisines), constitutes a significant aspect of the current political agenda for tourism recovery after Zero-Covid restrictions. Gastronomic hybridity promotion, in general, has been developed to diversify tourism economy beyond gambling, and to reflect the city’s mixed identity that justifies its role as a platform between China and Portuguese-speaking countries.
This talk focus on Macao’s membership to the UNESCO Creative Cities Network in Gastronomy, in order to examine local policies for culinary tourism, heritage, and identity; considering China’s soft power approach for economic expansion and the creation of global alliances.
Paper short abstract:
I examine dinner menus, food tours, festivals and other food events to explore how food entrepreneurs articulate a New Transylvanian Cuisine to tourist audiences, by drawing from nostalgic views on the past, aimed to connect Southern Transylvania to a global economy of sustainability.
Paper long abstract:
In the past years rural Southern Transylvania has been the site of a revivalist movement centred on the reconstruction and heritagisation of ethnic (Saxon) foodscape. The process is mobilised by a complex and cosmopolitan network of social actors engaged in small-scale food production, gastronomy, ecotourism and environmental conservation, fueled by a sense of exonostalgia (Berliner 2014) for an ‘unspoilt’ Arcadia, irreversibly lost in Western Europe.
In the context of this movement I examine dinner menus, food tours, festivals and other food events addressed to tourist audiences to explore how the ‘taste of Transylvania’ is being articulated. By drawing from representations of a past ecology and gastronomy, the food entrepreneurs stage a New Transylvanian Cuisine, aimed to connect Southern Transylvania to a global economy of sustainability, where frugality, remoteness and dispossession can be converted into added-value and symbolic prestige (see Weiss 2022, Meneley 2021, Bordi 2008). The analysis explores how value and taste are materialised into artisanal food commodities and experiences, particularly in a "cuisine of economy" framework (Weiss 2022), in which low-status foods migrate into the prestige-infused categories of fine-dining cuisine or culinary heritage. These engagements transform the local foodscape into a transnational moral and political arena, in which the heritagisation of the edible past is mobilised as an exclusivist ecological fix to Anthropocenic anxieties.