Intangible Cultural Property, Semiotic Ideology, and the Vagaries of Ethnoculinary Recognition

Abstract

Stephan Palmie My contribution to this special issue takes its origins in a footnote to an article on culinary metaphors in the modeling of African American cultural history that I published a few years ago (Palmie 2005). It was a long footnote on (what I think is) a fascinating instance of gastrographic revisionism very much apropos our common theme of “hybrid heritage” and even more interesting in light of current discussions about intangible cultural property. What I am concerned with in the following is, in principle at least, a well-known theme in the anthropology of food and cuisine, viz. the treatment of specific foods and preparations as emblematic markers of collective identities. Ever since Robertson Smith’s Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (1894), we have known that culinary practices can (and often do) serve as powerful vehicles for collective projections of a common history and future. Yet while much attention has been paid to the socializing function of commensality or patterned food avoidance, little attention (or so it seems to me) has been paid to the way in which culinary knowledge—shall we say “recipes”?— function to demarcate social boundaries, especially if and when they become objectified as intellectual property or intangible cultural heritage. This, however, is exactly what African American cookbook-writing advocates of conceptions of “culinary Pan-Africanism,” or even more radically, Afrocentric proponents of the idea of the willful denial of the African origins of much of the world’s high cuisines, have been arguing for some two decades. But let me establish a bit of context first. At least since the 1960s, US African American foodways—especially the culinary complex known as “soul food”—have been subject to explicit and often highly self-conscious politicization. As both the black writer and activist Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka (1966) and the founder of the Nation of Islam, the honorable Elijah Muhammad (1967) clearly recognized in their own very different ways, there is a vexing arbitrariness to the culinary signifier: eating corn bread, collard greens, ham hocks, or chitterlings by itself does not constitute an assertion or rejection of certain identities, subject positions, or visions of collective history. What does is the symbolic act of situating these same foods within narratives about their significance for patterns of commensal affinity among the oppressed and excluded (in Baraka’s case), or about hybrid heritage