From Cajun Crayfish to Spicy Little Lobster: A Tale of Local Culinary Politics in a Third-Tier City in China

Abstract

Foodways have always been an entry point for anthropologists’ investigations of cultures (Mintz and Du Bois 2002). Early anthropological research on food and cuisine centered largely upon questions of taboo, totems, sacrifice, and communion. With the cultural symbolism approach, the analyses emphasize how food reflects humans’ understandings of themselves and their relations with the physical world as well as the supernatural world. Structural anthropologists focus on edibility rules—why food is a symbol through which the “deep structure” of humanity can be investigated, and also how corresponding concepts of the body and spatial territories can be discerned. With the publication of Jack Goody’s Cooking, Cuisine, and Class: A Study in Comparative Sociology (1982), the anthropological study of food has turned our attention to many sociocultural issues in the larger political economy, which broadens our understanding of urbanization, modernization, class, social hierarchy, and the meanings of taste from a cultural and political perspective. Recent anthropological studies on Asian foodways have focused on changes in the local dynamics of production, representation, identity construction, postmodern consumerism, etc.; in particular, they have highlighted the globalization of local foodways as well as the localization of foreign foodways in various countries, reminding us that foodways are simultaneously local and global in terms of production, manufacturing, and marketing.