Abstract
Creatively operationalizing Claude Lévi-Strauss’ predicament that food is good to think with, I initiate a methodological conceptualization of food by exploring the ways in which it is apt to study Sri Lankan domestic and collective village life. Food is approached as an assemblage that is an emergent resultant of heterogeneous aspects with which it is deeply entangled and by way of which it turns into a potent agent shaping life. More specifically, I explore the vibrancy of these different components that co-create the overall soundscape of food that as such becomes the conductor of Sri Lankan life. Food shapes domestic life by way of its preparation and consumption, and through its cultivation also conducts the collective rhythms at the village level. The conceptualization of food as an assemblage seeks to develop it as a methodology that opens up for a holistic integration and interdisciplinary collaboration.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
The notion assemblage is the English translation from the French agencement as developed by Deleuze and Guattari and has constituted an approach that is cognate to Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) and Material Semiotics in their focus on the emergence of entities as a result of heterogeneous relations, human and non-human, where agency is distributed (Law 1999, 2009). However, the assemblage approach differs from ANT in that the latter flattens the topology in the form of networks, whereas assemblages can expand or shrink in all directions.
It should be remarked that the very idea of assemblage is not at all new as we can see from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’ (1898) work The Monadology, originally written in 1714, and specifically in paragraph 6, where he contrasts the monad, as a simple substance, with the compound (in our words assemblage) that: ‘comes into being or comes to an end by parts.’
I use pseudonyms for reasons of safeguarding privacy.
Recall that pelting rain is required for the filling of the tank for paddy cultivation whereas soft rain is better for the other forms of cultivation.
References
Albala, K. (Ed.). (2013). Routledge international handbook of food studies. London: Routledge.
Appadurai, A. (1981). Gastro-politics in Hindu South Asia. American Ethnologist, 8(3), 494–511.
Appadurai, A. (Ed.). (1986). The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Avakian, A. V., & Haber, B. (Eds.). (2005). From Betty Crocker to feminist food studies: Critical perspectives on women and food. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Barthes, R. (1997). Toward a psychosociology of contemporary food consumption. In C. Counihan & P. Van Esterik (Eds.), Food and culture: A reader (pp. 20–27). New York: Routledge.
Bell, D., & Valentine, G. (1997). Consuming geographies: We are where we eat. London: Routledge.
Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Durham: Duke University Press.
Bohm, D. (1980). Wholeness and the implicate order. London: Routledge Classics.
Bourdieu, P. (2008). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. (trans: Nice, R.), London: Routledge.
Clément, C. (1979). Le lieu de la musique. In R. Bellour & C. Clément (Eds.), Claude Lévi-Strauss: Textes de et sur Claude Lévi-Strauss (pp. 395–423). Saint-Amand: Éditions Gallimard.
Counihan, C. (1999). The anthropology of food and body: Gender, meaning, and power. New York: Routledge.
Counihan, C., & Siniscalchi, V. (Eds.). (2013). Food activism: Agency, democracy and economy. London: Bloomsbury.
Counihan, C., & Van Esterik, P. (Eds.). (1997). Food and culture: A reader. New York: Routledge.
Counihan, C., & Van Esterik, P. (Eds.). (2008). Food and culture: A reader (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge.
Crenn, C., Hassoun, J. P., & Medina, F. X. (2010). Introduction: Repenser et réimaginer l’acte alimentaire en situations de migration. Anthropology of Food, http://aof.revues.org/6672.
DeLanda, M. (2006). A new philosophy of society: Assemblage theory and social complexity. London: Continuum.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2009). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (trans: Massumi, B.) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2011). Anti-oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia (trans: Hurley, R., Seem, M., & Lane, H. R.). London: Continuum.
Douglas, M. (2008). Purity and danger: An analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo. London: Routledge Classics.
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1969). The Nuer: A description of the modes of livelihood and political institutions of a Nilotic people. New York: Oxford University Press.
Foster, R. J. (2008). Coca-globalization: Following soft drinks from New York to New Guinea. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Gabora, L., & Aerts, D. (2005). Evolution as a context-driven actualization of potential. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 30(1), 69–88.
Goody, J. (1982). Cooking, cuisine and class: A study in comparative sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Harris, M. (1985). Good to eat: Riddles of food and culture. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.
Ingold, T., & Pálsson, G. (Eds.). (2013). Biosocial becomings: Integrating social and biological anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Inness, S. A. (2001). Cooking lessons: The politics of gender and food. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Kahn, M. (1986). Always hungry, never greedy: Food and the expression of gender in a Melanesian society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Khare, R. S. (Ed.). (1992). The eternal food: Gastronomic ideas and experiences of Hindus and Buddhists. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Law, J. (1999). After ANT: Complexity, naming and topology. The Sociological Review, 47(S1), 1–14.
Law, J. (2009). Actor network theory and material semiotics. In B. Turner (Ed.), The new Blackwell companion to social theory (pp. 141–158). Malden: Blackwell Publishing.
Lefebvre, H. (2004). Rhythmanalysis: Space, time and everyday life (trans: Elden, S.). London: Continuum.
Leibniz, G. W. (1898). The monadology (trans: Latta, R.). http://home.datacomm.ch/kerguelen/monadology/monadology.html.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1983). The Raw and the Cooked (trans: Weightman, J., & Weightman, D.). Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (2008). The culinary triangle. In C. Counihan & P. Van Esterik (Eds.), Food and culture: A reader (2nd ed., pp. 36–43). New York: Routledge.
Lien, M. E. (2004). The politics of food: An introduction. In M. E. Lien & B. Nerlich (Eds.), The politics of food (pp. 1–17). Oxford: Berg.
Malinowski, B. (1984). Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An account of native enterprise and adventure in the archipelagos of Melanesian New Guinea. Long Grove, Illinois: Waveland Press.
Mauss, M. (1990). The gift: The form and reason for exchange in archaic societies (trans: Halls, W. D.). New York: W.W. Norton.
McNeill, W. H. (1999). How the potato changed the world’s history. Social Research, 66(1), 67–83.
Mintz, S. W. (1985). Sweetness and power: The place of sugar in modern history. New York: Penguin Books.
Murcott, A., Belasco, W., & Jackson, P. (Eds.). (2013). The handbook of food research. London: Bloomsbury.
Phillips, L. (2006). Food and globalization. Annual Review of Anthropology, 35, 37–57.
Ray, K., & Srinivas, T. (Eds.). (2012). Curried cultures: Globalization, food, and South Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Richards, A. I. (2004). Hunger and work in a savage tribe: A functional study of nutrition among the southern Bantu. London and New York: Routledge.
Robertson, E. (2009). Chocolate, women and empire: A social and cultural history. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Sahlins, M. D. (1976). Culture and practical reason. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Scholliers, P. (2007). Twenty-five years of studying un Phénomène Social Total: Food history writing on Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Food, Culture & Society, 10(3), 450–471.
Senellart, M. (Ed.). (2010). The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979/Michel Foucault. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Sloterdijk, P. (2003). Sferen (trans: Driessen, H.). Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Boom.
Tsing, A. L. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Van Daele, W. (2013). Igniting food assemblages in Sri Lanka: Ritual cooking to regenerate the world and interrelations. Contributions to Indian Sociology, 47(1), 33–60.
Walens, S. (1981). Feasting with cannibals: An essay on Kwakiutl cosmology. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Warde, A. (1997). Consumption, food and taste: Culinary antinomies and commodity culture. London: Sage Publications.
Williams-Forson, P., & Counihan, C. (Eds.). (2011). Taking food public: Redefining foodways in a changing world. New York: Routledge.
Acknowledgements
The research leading to this publication has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013)/ERC Grant Agreement nr 295843. I wish to thank the ERC for its generous support as well as Marianne Lien, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Vito Laterza, and the anonymous reviewers for commenting on earlier drafts, none of them, however bearing any responsibility for the final views expressed here.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Van Daele, W. Vibrantly Entangled in Sri Lanka: Food as the Polyrhythmic and Polyphonic Assemblage of Life. Found Sci 23, 85–102 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-016-9509-4
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-016-9509-4