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- Convenors:
-
Ester Bardone
(University of Tartu)
Håkan Jönsson (Lund University)
Send message to Convenors
- Chair:
-
Konrad Köstlin
(Universität Wien)
- Stream:
- Food
- Location:
- KWZ 0.610
- Start time:
- 29 March, 2017 at
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
The panel invites papers dealing with everything from kitchen table conversations over the design and architecture of kitchens, to the preparation and intake of meals and sharing one's cooking experiences online. Researchers with varied disciplinary perspectives are all equally welcome.
Long Abstract:
Kitchens are more than places for domestic food production. In the kitchen both trivial and life-changing conversations, happy meals and family fights take place. Kitchens are the places of dwelling that more than any other room in our home reflect the big social, economic and technological changes in the Western society over the past hundred years. Modern kitchens have been battlefields for negotiating gender roles as well as arenas for performing identities. Stories are told in kitchens, and can be told about kitchens. Kitchen narratives may be revealed in oral forms or as memories and recollections, but they may likewise be communicated through the materiality of furniture and cooking utensils, visual images and virtual environments.
The panel invites papers dealing with everything from kitchen table conversations over the design and architecture of kitchens, to the preparation and intake of meals and sharing one's cooking experiences online. Researchers with perspectives from ethnology, anthropology, folklore, food studies, semiotics, material culture, or other scholarly backgrounds are all equally welcome to join the panel.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
Informants have been asked to examine their kitchen drawers and cupboards and tell about artefacts that are no longer in use. The tales of the abandoned kitchen utensils are used to discuss how cultural processes are shaped, negotiated and developed in the trivial practices of everyday life.
Paper long abstract:
The paper tries to uncover tales of kitchen utensils. As part of an ongoing research project on transitions of kitchens, artifacts, meals and cooking in contemporary Swedish households, informants were asked to examine the drawers and cupboards of their kitchen with special emphasis on what they have not used for a long time or have thrown away. This kitchen dumpster diving exercise was a bit like an archeological excavation, where different layers of time are apparent in the same kitchen. Brand new electrical screw drivers were to be found next to baking tins that have been inherited for generations. While some artefacts such as baking machines and fondue pots had been abandoned, others, such as meat grinders are being revitalized.
The kitchen's role as an arena for material cultural heritage will be discussed in the paper. It is argued that cultural processes are shaped, negotiated and developed in the trivial practices of everyday life in domestic kitchens. The main source of theoretical inspiration comes from Jean Claude Kaufmann's thesis that contemporary cooking and eating is located in a field of tension between the rationalities of the first and second modernity.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores food storage as means to study sustainable food practices, and thus perceptions of sustainability, in a contemporary and historical perspective. It investigates the potential of researching stories and practices related to sustainability by turning to fridges and cupboards.
Paper long abstract:
Multiple ethnographical food and kitchen related studies focus on the social setting and the food consumption, but few have paid attention to the actual storage unit in a cultural and household context (for exceptions see e.g. Shove and Southerton 2000). The fridge as a material vessel both tell and contain multiple stories about food culture. As materiality it tells the history of refrigeration and changes in food consumption (Rees 2013). As an interviewing prop it can generate fridge stories when exploring perceptions and practices in a household context (Joosse 2014, Marshall forthcoming). Additionally, folklife archives and governmental research institutions (e.g. Boalt 1964) contain documentations of food storage units and their contents and thus offer insights to how people have organized their food and to how the storage practices have changed over time.
In a time where sustainability has become an influential narrative in society, this paper aims to explore how food storage can be used to study sustainable food practices - and thus perceptions of sustainability - in a contemporary and historical perspective. It departs from findings from my PhD dissertation on sustainable food practices in everyday life and on initial ideas for a potential research project.
Questions I wish to explore are: What storage practices have been adopted, altered, abandoned and resurrected since the accessibility of refrigeration for the general public? Which stories have so far been untold? And how do ideas of sustainability relate to storage practices?
Paper short abstract:
A questionnaire issued by tradition archive Norwegian Ethnological Research in 2016 on stories from "my kitchen", there is a remarkable great demand for organic and sustainable food. I this paper I investigate the respondents answers as a form of activism towards the modern food system.
Paper long abstract:
A questionnaire issued by tradition archive Norwegian Ethnological Research in 2016 on stories from "my kitchen", there is a remarkable great demand for organic and sustainable food.
People across the country in urban and rural areas, young and old prefer organic and local food. "I always buy organic eggs," is a common phrase. Many prefer to cook from scratch, providing food from kitchen gardens, forest and sea is not uncommon.
Official Norwegian policy through several governments is that by 2020, 15 percent of national food production and consumption is to be organic. Organic farming has even status as the spearhead and corrective to conventional agriculture.
This policy has however not yet gained much effect. Compared to other Nordic countries, there are not many organic food products in Norwegian supermarkets and food stores. The production has neither increased. In other words, it seems that there is a gap between what people want and what they easily can get.
In my paper I investigate the respondents answers as a form of activism. Inspired by the British scholar Sarah Pink and her kitchen studies from 2012, I will look at food practices in the kitchens as activism in everyday life, as a resistance towards the modern food system and as expression of innovation, creativity and responsibility.
References:
Pink, Sarah (2012): Situating Everday Life. Practices and Places. Sage.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper we focus on how Estonian museums have interpreted the materiality of the modern kitchen and how kitchens are represented in displays. In the centre of analysis are interrelationship between museum space and exhibition design, material objects and mediated kitchen materialities.
Paper long abstract:
A renewed interest in material culture has been evident in European ethnology during the last decades. The focus has shifted towards studying how people interact with things, creating worlds of practice. The crucial importance of human relationships and behaviours with the material world has been underlined, preferring the concept of materiality as it describes an open dimension in cultural processes rather than delineating a category of objects (Daniel Miller, Elisabeth Shove, Sarah Pink). Most of kitchen research have dealt with the design or cooking practices, while less light has been shed on how kitchen materiality affects or reflects everyday practices.
In Estonian ethnology there is a small number of studies discussing kitchen culture from the viewpoint of rural architecture, urban home decoration, and food culture. Due to heritage policies shaping museum collections kitchens have received less attention than other rooms of the home. Documentation of lived kitchen interiors and kitchen practices is fragmentary.
In this paper we want to focus on how Estonian museums have collected and interpreted the materiality of the modern kitchen and how kitchens are represented in displays. We examine temporary kitchen exhibitions as well as kitchens as part of the permanent exhibition. The study relies on interviews with museum curators and researchers as well as analyses of museum displays (objects, plans, photos, texts etc.), programmes and events. We focus on interrelationship between museum space and exhibition design, interpretation and presentation of material objects related to the kitchen and mediated kitchen materialities.
Paper short abstract:
The paper presents the phenomena of secondary kitchens – a setting of the dwelling, equipped with kitchen utensils and intended for regular or occasional food processing – in the Vipava Valley. It discusses its different types and purposes as well as conditions and reasons of its establishment.
Paper long abstract:
Secondary kitchen is a setting of the dwelling, equipped with kitchen utensils and intended for regular or occasional food processing, and may also be used for other purposes - dining, socializing, communication and escape. In case of multi-kitchen household a garage, a basement, a hallway or a shed outdoors was equipped with kitchen utensils. Some of secondary kitchens were used occasionally or during summer season, the others were used on a daily basis. With regard to the purpose working, sociable and personal secondary kitchens can be differed.
The conditions for the secondary kitchens were sufficient spatial and economic capacities, whereas the reasons were various and connected with too small, non-functional, representative and/or in the background of the first floor located primary kitchen. Whereas the past kitchens in the Vipava Valley used to be the central and multifunctional setting of the dwelling, the standardized blueprints for a house, common in the 1970' and 1980', didn't provide the usual connection of the kitchen space with yard, but situated kitchens either in the background of the house or on the first floor. In addition, the kitchens were usually too small for some long-lasting and a lot of work space requesting food processing processes as well as for work or staying of more than one person. Newly designed kitchens were not adjusted to the habitual kitchen and dwelling practices of the residents, therefore secondary kitchens took over the role of the fully equipped working place and/or of the multifunctional and central setting of the dwelling.
Paper short abstract:
Kitchen was the area of women's labour, creativity and knowledge. Oral transmission was a centuries old form of passing down the culinary knowledge. With increasing literacy among women handwritten recipes were composed. The recipes recount stories of Slovenian families and their food culture.
Paper long abstract:
In the past hundred years, kitchen in Slovenia was, due to the lack of sufficient living spaces, often considered as the main living room. Since the idea that processing is essential for the "proper" or better kind of food was widespread in different cultural environments, kitchens were, as Claude Lévi-Strauss observed, spaces where nature was transformed into culture. In Slovenian homes of the past, the knowledge regarding the processing of foodstuffs and the preparation of meals belonged to the women's domain, and was transmitted orally within families from older generations of women to the younger. With greater literacy among women in the second half of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century, collections of handwritten recipes were created, which were handed down through the female line of families. These contained recipes for everyday dishes as well as for some precious family recipes for special meals, which marked the important family occasions. On the basis of the analysis of the handwritten recipe anthologies and the related material acquired through narrative interviews, the author will examine the preparation of everyday and festive dishes, and the innovations that were implemented in Slovenian cuisine at the end of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century. She will address the issues of integration and exclusion on the basis of culinary knowledge, the strengthening of the sense of belonging to family and broader social groups, and the preservation of family traditions.
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Paper short abstract:
The food of supposedly Mittel-European origins has in the past few years flooded the culinary landscape of Trieste. This turn is connected to a wider shift in the interpretations of Trieste’s identity that evoke the local history of the Habsburg Empire and its “cosmopolitanism”.
Paper long abstract:
My title is an adaptation of a more famous one composed by the recently deceased Sidney Mintz indicating the significance of the food choices that humans make. My case study investigates the nostalgia for the Habsburg Empire in 21st-century Trieste. More precisely, it traces it on the "typical" Triestine plates.
The phenomenon that has been the focus of my latest ethnographic endeavours reveals itself as a metamorphosis on Trieste's menus. The typically Italian pasta, pizza and tiramisu have been replaced by strudel, goulash and sauerkraut that supposedly reveal the true identity of this port city. Such dishes recall the flourishing times of the 19th century when Trieste reached its highpoint as a part of the Habsburg Empire. The times when Trieste existed as a cosmopolitan and liberal island, which significantly transformed only in the late 19th century when nationalism divided the city into Slovenian and Italian. Then the city forgot its "true" culturally diverse identity that nowadays many of its inhabitants try to highlight.
Along these lines also the culinary enthusiasts prefer to emphasize the Habsburg or Mittel-European character of the Triestine cuisine and promote it as culturally distinctive from the traditional Italian one. These enthusiasts promote dishes that stress Trieste's Austrian or Hungarian origins and its belonging to Central Europe; in the process they ignore some dishes' fundamental Slavic roots.
This presentation seeks to give an overview of Trieste's culinary nostalgia and to recognize it as a result of a broader shift in the local identity.