Eating one’s own otherness: When producers commercialize their ethnicities

Abstract

Recently, several Brazilian chefs engaged in redefining the country’s cuisine by rediscovering its roots through the commercialization of Amazonian ingredients. These chefs, who belong to a dominant culture in Brazil, envisioned an ethnic cuisine based on elements denoting traces of authenticity—e.g., geographical origin—disregarding other aspects of the producers’ ethnicities. This scenario of ‘eating the Other’, a process through which difference is commercialized for the benefit of a dominant culture, imposes challenges to ethnic producers, who face a process of adjusting (or resisting) their forms of production. In this paper, we explore the conflicts endured by ethnic producers who have been Othered in the commercialization of their ethnicities. Our findings, emerging from a multi-method qualitative study, explore their reactions, which vary according to their level of compliance with the envisioned ethnic cuisine. We conclude by discussing the positions that ethnic producers can take in the commercialization of their ethnicities.