Moveable Feasts: Food as Revitalizing Cultural Heritage

Abstract

Food has long been considered a primary marker of cultural heritage, and in many places around the world it helps foster cultural revitalization movements—bottom-up, community-based undertakings that stand in stark contrast to traditional economic development paradigms. A revitalization movement is a deliberate, organized, conscious effort by members of a society to construct a more satisfying culture that draws upon selective understandings of the past to posit a way forward for the future. In this chapter, the authors find remarkable comparisons between Vietnam (Hội An), Italy (Pietrelcina), and the USA (Tucson, Arizona) in which food and food-based festivals are deployed within broader preservation initiatives to emotionally, socially, and even physically move diverse groups of stakeholders within societies suffering from socioeconomic stresses into favorable and productive engagements with each other. The authors argue that food represents heritage in action in three ways: First, as an element of heritage, food moves through time as it is reinvented, reconceptualized, and, in certain places like Pietrelcina and Tucson, recultivated after years of falling out of favor. Second, food moves locals emotionally, tugging at their memories, conveying value-based moral claims concerning their society, and bringing them together in festivals, pilgrimages, and community gardening projects. Finally, the same foodstuffs move through space in their communities of origin and circulate abroad, creating equally moving tourist imaginaries and associations that serve to put these places on the map. All of these movements help to foster more sustainable and engaged revitalization programs. Grounded in anthropological theory and long-term engagement in heritage conservation initiatives, the authors present a model of how heritage (and its associated heritage tourism) can positively impact local communities in intangible ways that go beyond mere economic benefits to sustainably reorient and re-center the identity and values of communities struggling with ways to remain relevant and viable amid the upheavals of globalization and modernization.