Appetites and Identities

An Introduction to the Social Anthropology of Western Europe

Sara Delamont

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134924738
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

Appetites and Identities is a clear, inviting and fascinating introduction to the social anthropology of western Europe. It covers food, migration, politics, urban and country life, magic, religion, sex and language in an accessible and straightforward fashion, introducing the student to aspects of the anthropology of contemporary European culture from mussel farmers in the Netherlands to Basque chambermaids in Lourdes, and from unhappy bachelors in western Ireland to unwitchers in Portugal.
Avoiding the technical language of many anthropological textbooks, Appetites and Identities sets out the anthropological literature on the rich diversity of dialects, cultures and everyday lives of western European people, offering fascinating insights on how each region and community differs from its counterparts despite the notion of an integrated Europe. The book will stimulate curiosity about social anthropological investigation, and about life in Europe today.

Chapter 1
Travellers on a hill
Introduction to the social anthropology of western Europe

like two travellers on a hill, who stay
Viewing the smoke that dims the busy plains

… (Flecker, 1947:49)

INTRODUCTION

The book is intended for two audiences. First there are people studying ‘European Societies’, or ‘European Community Studies’, or some sub-set of the countries in Europe, who are not anthropologists.This group—including, for example, a British student of Cypriot origin doing a degree in Greek and French—is my main target audience. Secondly, there are sociology, geography or anthropology students who need an introductory overview of the anthropology of western Europe.

It is called Appetites and Identities because it celebrates the variety of tastes (in food, drink, family life, language and religion) and the variety of identities that can be found in western Europe.

This is a book about the lives of ordinary people in western Europe, and celebrates the diversity of life. It is intended for people doing a wide range of courses, and the idea is that the findings of anthropology throw light on many aspects of life in western Europe which remain puzzling without them. Thus the volume starts with food: the source of much tension, dispute and mutual misunderstanding in contemporary Europe. Then there are chapters on farming and fishing; on refugees, migrants and tourists; on peripheral regions; on cities; on local politics; on religion; on gender and on language. The reader who works through the book will understand the western European diversity and similarity much better, and have absorbed some social anthropology.

Because there will be readers unfamiliar with social anthropology there is a glossary of some anthropological terms at the end of the book and a list of the places mentioned in the text where research has been conducted, with a reference to a publication on it. Most of the place names are pseudonyms to protect the real people who live in that village or neighbourhood.

There is now a large literature on the social anthropology of western Europe with far too many books and articles to include in detail in one volume. To cut down the material, this text only deals with research published in English, which means that scholars who are British and American, or those from other countries who publish in English, are the dominant voices. A few French scholars, whose work has been translated and published in English, are the only representatives of other anthropological traditions. The ‘Babel tongues’ of Chapter 10 are the many languages of the peoples studied by anthropologists, not the languages of the books and articles synthesised.

A second strategy for dealing with the large literature also serves to differentiate this book from Davis (1977), a classic introduction to the social anthropology of the Mediterranean area. I have tried to draw my examples from monographs and journal articles which are not well known, or have been published since Davis wrote, so that this book reads very differently from Davis (1977). Each chapter includes a few case studies where detailed ethnographic material is available, chosen to illustrate the points made. At the end of each chapter is an activity and/or a particular text suggested for further reading which will introduce the reader to the style of anthropological research and to its literature and/or its understandings.

This chapter introduces five key issues which have to be grasped before the rest of the volume makes sense. These include the concept of cultural relativism, the research methods used by anthropologists, ‘going native’, the history of anthropological research in Europe and its difficulties, and a note on the geographical scope of the book. Before these major themes, there is a caveat for anthropologists. This book simplifies the anthropology of Europe, in that it leaves out some of the most theoretically stretching debates, and some of the fascinating details (such as Ott’s 1981 material on ‘blessed bread’) and treats the texts of anthropologists in an unproblematic way. A course for anthropology students would necessarily have to encompass the theories important in the subject, face the complexities of stories such as Ott’s, and treat the texts as socially constructed (Atkinson, 1990, 1992). Students studying ‘French Language and Society’ courses neither need nor want, nor have the social science background, to follow such debates, which are simply ignored in this volume.

The main purpose of the book is to show that western Europe contains many diverse cultures, which are not simply bounded by nation states. There are communities which have existed much longer than the nation states which now encompass them, and cultures which cross national boundaries. To understand the present it may be necessary to look back a thousand years, or examine geographical similarities across borders. Thus the modern inhabitant of the Friuli area of Italy (Holmes, 1989) has similarities with the heretics persecuted there in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Ginzburg, 1980, 1983). Hostilities between Serbs and Croats have some roots in the separation of the Catholic and Orthodox Christian churches and the sacking of Constantinople by Crusaders in 1204. Modern nation states, and multinational organisations cannot wipe away these continuities. Equally, national boundaries may divide people whose way of life is very similar. The everyday life of a woman in a French Alpine village is more similar to that of her equivalent in an Italian, Swiss or Austrian Alpine village than it is to an urban Frenchwoman, or a village woman in Brittany or Lorraine, or on the Languedoc coast, yet she is still ‘French’, not Italian, Swiss or Austrian.

Anthropologists have studied a range of diverse lifestyles all over Europe, and this book is a celebration of the multiple cultures and multiple populations of western Europe.

A book can only synthesise material which exists. Most of the material discussed in this volume is on Eire, the UK, Portugal, Spain, some regions of France (especially Brittany), Italy, Greece, Cyprus, Malta and The Netherlands. Germany, Austria and Belgium, are mentioned occasionally, while Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Luxembourg are largely absent, because there are relatively few studies by social anthropologists available in English. When the chapters are focused on immigration, or guestworkers or refugees, residents of western Europe whose origins are in Turkey or Serbia or Tunisia or other labour-exporting countries are mentioned briefly. This reflects the published work by anthropologists in English not the political importance of the countries, or the density of their populations, or the power of their economies. The themes chosen for the book are equally relevant to all countries, but the illustrative material is not equally available.

CULTURAL RELATIVISM

Cultural relativism is a grand-sounding phrase, but it is an essential part of how anthropological researchers collect their data, and not difficult to understand. When we come across something that is done a different way from the one we are used to, it is easy to judge it as ‘wrong’ (or peculiar, or revolting, or immoral, or unnatural). If you have always slept at night and been up during the day, it would seem odd to move to a culture where people were nocturnal. If you have grown up wearing clothes, a nudist colony would be embarrassing, and might seem immoral. Food is an area where it is hard to accept other people’s way of doing things. If you grew up in a traditional Yorkshire home, where the Yorkshire pudding was served with gravy as a separate course before the roast beef and vegetables, then you would find it odd to have them served together all on one plate. If you had grown up with them served together, getting a plate of Yorkshire pudding and gravy on their own would seem odd. Being a good researcher involves suspending judgement, and focusing on why people do what they do, believe what they believe, eat what they eat, drink what they drink and say what they say, in their culture. A good example of a researcher putting his own ideas aside so he could understand another culture is Crapanzano’s (1985) book on Afrikaners in South Africa. He hated everything they stood for, but put that aside to study how they saw their world. Researchers in Europe are not likely to come across practices and beliefs as far from their own as anthropologists who study Indians in the South American rain-forest or the aboriginal inhabitants of the Malay peninsula, but cultural relativism is still needed. A simple example will suffice.

Patrick Leigh Fermor and a companion were in a small town on the coast of mainland Greece called Astakos. It was extremely hot and the taverna had only egg and chips to eat.

Even at nine in the evening the town was hardly cooler than at noon…It had been a day of heat, glare, loss, breakdown and illness…After half an hour the old woman clip-clopped out of the shadows with a plate in either hand. ‘I’m sorry they’ve been so long’, she said kindly. ‘It’s the cooling that eats up the time.’

‘The cooling?’

‘Hot food is bad. It makes people ill.’

I remembered that this belief prevails in certain remote regions. Hot fried eggs are especially dangerous and a prudent cook sets them aside until they seize up. The yolks stiffen to discs of yellow cardboard in a matrix of white glâcé kid islanded in cold oil…

(1966:149)

Fermor and his companion could not face eating these eggs, and most readers of this book probably could not eat them either. However, as a proper researcher it is advisable not only to eat them, but to accept while ‘in the field’ the belief that hot food is bad for humans, and to include the set of ideas about hot and cold and healthy and unhealthy foods in the research. Failure to adapt to such beliefs will not only impede the research, in that the locals will be constantly reminded that the researcher is not a local, it will also close off an avenue for exploring the culture you have come to study. In August 1992 the British weekly magazine Women’s Own published the results of a survey of 1,000 women, done by a leading market research firm, on their knowledge of the EEC. The results showed that British women were very ignorant about the EEC. Only 69 per cent of the women knew that Britain was a member of the EEC, and 92 per cent could not list the twelve members; 40 per cent did not know who Jacques Delors was, replying that he was a racing driver, a fashion designer or a kind of perfume; only 30 per cent knew what the EEC was, and half did not know what Maastricht was including one person who thought it was a Dutch cheese.

Given this level of ignorance, prejudices can flourish completely unchecked. However, prejudices are not dispelled by knowledge alone. Knowing Denmark is a member of the EEC does not dispel prejudices against Danes, or the Danish government fishing policy, or make British pig farmers think more kindly of the Danish bacon marketing policies. However, if one can cultivate an attitude of cultural relativism, it is possible to understand why Danish fishing policy takes the form it does. At a local level, if you found yourself in the Dutch village of St Gerlach on the second Saturday in June you might wonder why there was an enormous traffic jam, but if you read Bax (1985b) you would know the cars were being blessed by the local monks in the name of St Gerlach, and you would understand why. Even if you were not interested in having the monks bless your car, you could be sympathetic to the motives of these clogging up the streets. Similarly once you have read Campbell (1964), Machin (1983) or Stewart (1991), and discovered that phantoms (fantakta) appear at mid-day in rural Greece, you would appreciate why country-dwellers are so committed to a siesta that keeps respectable people in their homes.

There is a danger as severe as failing to adopt cultural relativity: that is ‘going native’, discussed after the methods used by social anthropologists have been explained.

HOW ARE DATA COLLECTED?

To understand the material used in this book it is useful to know how the data are collected. There are two ways to find out what social anthropologists do: textbooks on methods and autobiographical accounts by researchers of what they did. Textbooks on methods usually set out what researchers ought to do, while scholars’ autobiographies usually tell stories about how everything nearly went wrong and the research nearly failed altogether. A good textbook on how to do the sort of research described in this book is Hammersley and Atkinson (1983), and the book by Pina-Cabral and Campbell (1992) is a collection of autobiographical accounts. Most of the books mentioned in this volume have some account of how the data were collected, often tucked away in an appendix, but sometimes early on, like Barrett (1974:4–22). Because this is a book written for people who are strangers to anthropology, I have described an imaginary piece of research, to illustrate what anthropologists do. The main methods used are briefly described, but not all researchers would be comfortable with all of them, not all ‘work’ in every setting, not all are possible for every scholar, and not everyone is interested in the data they generate. After the imaginary project invented to display possible ways a scholar can get data, some examples of actual autobiographical material from anthropologists are given.

Central to anthropology is fieldwork. This does not mean working in a field, but choosing a place to stay and going to live in it, which is known as being ‘in the field’. A typical anthropologist is about 22 or 23 when she starts her first, and most important piece of research, her first proper fieldwork. The account of ‘Rachel Verinder’s’ fieldwork is based on autobiographical accounts published by successful anthropologists and interviews with twenty-four social anthropology PhD students in Britain done during 1991 as part of a research project.

Imagine Rachel Verinder has graduated in social anthropology, and has been offered a scholarship to do a PhD at Boarbridge University. She and her thesis supervisor, Dr Selina Goby, decide that Rachel should do research on Galicians and the Galician regionalist and separatist movement (Galicia is a region in north-western Spain). Rachel did ‘A’ level Spanish and has spent several holidays there since, and she is interested in Atlantic maritime cultures, the lives of women in fishing communities and regionalist movements in Europe. For nine months Rachel stays in Boarbridge, improving her knowledge of social anthropology, especially the anthropology of Europe and of maritime societies, reading about Galicia, and other regions of Spain, and learning the Galician dialect/language. Then she packs appropriate clothes and equipment for collecting data, such as a camera, tape-recorder and lots of notebooks and pens, and sets off from Boarbridge for the ferry to Santander. When she lands in Spain she heads for Galicia, and searches out a fishing village where she will live for the next year or more. She has to try several villages before she finds one that has a bus service to the nearest town, has a family who are prepared to rent her a room, and has fishing boats still working.

Once settled, Rachel is ‘in the field’, and she can start her fieldwork. The most important part is living in the village, and watching what goes on. Where feasible Rachel will do things with people in the village, where it is not feasible to join in, she will watch what she is allowed to. Once the villagers have got used to her being around, watching is supplemented with talking. Rachel talks informally to everyone possible, does formal interviews with people, collecting their family trees and hearing their life stories, plus gathering folk tales and songs, listening to gossip, jokes and legends.

A fieldworker is likely to draw maps of the village, of the insides of houses, of the graveyard, diagrams of the seating plans at weddings or funerals, the layout of fishing boats and anything else which has a spatial angle. Rachel will count the number of residents in the village, count the fishing boats, measure the sizes of fields, orchards and pastures, count cows, sheep and pigs, estimate the size of the fishing catch, work out how many tourists come, how many people get the bus each day, how many cars, taxis, motor scooters and even bicycles there are, how many pupils in the school and so on. It will be important to hear who speaks Galician and who does not, and when Galician and Castilian (Spanish) are used. If Rachel is allowed on a fishing boat she will go, if not she will find out why women are not allowed to sail on them. The lives of the women will probably be easier for her to observe than those of men. If there is separatist political activity, Rachel will try to attend any meetings, meet the activists and discover what is motivating them.

Apart from what she can see, and what she can learn by listening and asking, there may also be documents. Rachel might spend days in the provincial capital working on municipal archival material, or in the cathedral or ecclesiastical records, or both. If the Galician regionalist movement has produced newsletters, or pamphlets, or books, these will all be read. Rachel might get the schoolchildren to write her something, or ask to read letters sent home by villagers living abroad.

As Rachel goes on living in the village she will find that she has been told different things by different people and she will set out to find out why. As her Galician improves, she will s...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• CHAPTER 1: TRAVELLERS ON A HILL
• CHAPTER 2: THE GOLDEN ORANGES
• CHAPTER 3: THE VINES THAT TRAIL
• CHAPTER 4: THE TRAMPLED GARDEN
• CHAPTER 5: THE SMOKELESS HOMES
• CHAPTER 6: TOWNS WITH TOWERS
• CHAPTER 7: AND WITH GREAT LIES
• CHAPTER 8: TURNED IN PRAYER
• CHAPTER 9: THE GOSSIPS OF THE TOWN
• CHAPTER 10: ALL BABEL TONGUES
• CHAPTER 11: RINGED WITH A LAKE OF FIRE
• GLOSSARY OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL TERMS
• DIRECTORY OF RESEARCH SITES
• REFERENCES