'Go on, just try some!': Meat and meaning-making among South Indian christians

South Asia: Journal of South Asia Studies

Volumn 31, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 36-55

  Staples, James ^a  

^a BRUNEL UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CASTE; CHRISTIANITY; CULTURAL INFLUENCE; DIET; FOOD SELECTION; HINDUISM; SYMBOLISM;

ASIA; EURASIA; INDIA; SOUTH ASIA;

ANIMALIA;

EID: 40949088668     PISSN: 00856401     EISSN: 14790270     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00856400701874700     Document Type: Article

References (64)

1. See, for example, Andre Béteille, Caste, Class and Power: Changing Patterns of Stratification in a Tanjore Village (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp.56-60;
2. Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and its Implications (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1970), pp.141-8;
3. McKim Marriott, 'Caste Ranking and Food Transactions: A Matrix Analysis', in M. Singer and B.S. Cohn (eds), Structure and Change in Indian Society (Chicago: Aldine, 1968), pp.133-71;
4. and Adrian Mayer, Caste and Kinship in Central India: A Village and its Region (London: Routledge, 1960).
5. See, for example, A.M. Hocart, Caste: A Comparative Study (London: Methuen, 1950);
6. Richard Burghart, 'Hierarchical Models of the Hindu Social System', in Man, Vol.XIIV, no.4 (1978), pp.519-36;
7. Nicholas Dirks, The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987);
8. and Nicholas Dirks, 'The Original Caste: Power, History and Hierarchy in South Asia', in Contributions to Indian Sociology (n.s.), Vol.XXIII, no.1 (1989), pp.59-77.
9. F. Zimmermann, The Jungle and the Aroma of Meats: An Ecological Theme in Hindu Medicine (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, [1982] 1999), p.187.
10. See for example Pat Caplan, 'Food in Middle-Class Madras Households from the 1970s to the 1990s', in K. Cwiertka and B. Walraven (eds), Asian Food: The Global and the Local (Richmond: Curzon, 2002), pp.46-62 on food and the urban middle classes;
11. F. Conlon, 'Dining Out in Bombay', in Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), pp.90-130, on 'public dining';
12. H. Papanek, 'To Each Less Than She Needs, From Each More Than She Can Do: Locations, Entitlements and Value', in I. Tinker (ed.), Persistent Inequalities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp.162-81;
13. and T. Selwyn, 'The Order of Men and the Order of Things: An Examination of Food Transactions in an Indian Village', in International Journal of the Sociology of Law, Vol.VIII (1980), pp.297-317, on gender and food;
14. and - as a guard against cultural over-determinism - Barbara Harriss-White, 'The Inter-Family Distribution of Hunger in South Asia', in J. Dreze and A. Sen (eds), The Political Economy of Hunger, Vol.1 (Clarendon Press, 1990)
15. and Barbara Harriss-White, 'Nutrition and its Politics in Tamil Nadu', in South Asia Research, Vol.XXIV, no.1 (2004) pp.51-71, on the economics of food consumption.
16. I use the term 'caste Hindus' to refer to those who categorised themselves as belonging to castes that can notionally be located within the classic varna system or, to put it another way, all those not from Scheduled Castes and Tribes (the administrative categories for those formerly considered 'untouchable').
17. M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (trans. C. Smith) (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962).
18. I have written in detail elsewhere about Bethany, initially under the pseudonym Anandapuram. See, for example, James Staples, "'Peculiar People, Amazing Lives". A Study of Social Exclusion and Community- Making among Leprosy A.ected People in South India', unpublished PhD thesis, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 2003;
19. James Staples, 'Disguise, Revelation and Copyright: Disassembling the South Indian Leper', in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (n.s.) Vol.IX (2003), pp.291-309;
20. James Staples, 'Delineating Disease: Self-Management of Leprosy Identities in South India', in Medical Anthropology, Vol.XXIII, no.1 (2004), pp.66-89;
21. and James Staples, 'Peculiar People, Amazing Lives'. Leprosy, Social Exclusion and Community-Making in South India (Delhi: Orient Longman, 2007).
22. Andhra Pradesh District Gazetteers (Guntur: Government of Andhra Pradesh, Government Publications Bureau, 1977), pp.297-331.
23. The Madras Presidency later became the state of Andhra Pradesh, but the borders of the former do not match exactly the borders of the latter.
24. J.E. Graefe, 'Islam and Christianity in Guntur', in Moslem World, Vol.XV (1925), pp.119-34.
25. See the website http://www.andhrapradesh.com/apwebsite/tables/Population/ table_21.htm for further statistical breakdown.
26. The Telugu term dora (from the Turanian root tur, meaning swift or powerful) means, according to the dictionary, a chief, a baron, a lord, master, owner, ruler or king. See C.P. Brown, Telugu English Dictionary. Second Edition (Madras: Asian Educational Series, 1903). According to Susan Bayly, the doras were also a class of 'fortress-dwelling land-controllers' - of 'little kings' - in the Telengana region on the Andhra - Maharashtra borderlands.
27. See Susan Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p.327. In Bethany the term - combined with the honori.c garu (comparable to the Hindi su.x ji) - was used exclusively in relation to foreign men, rather than the term ayya garu - 'sir' or 'father' - commonly used as a term of respect for local people (such as government officials) and sometimes used by others to address me in contexts outside the village.
28. See John Comaro. and Jean Comaroff, Modernity and its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Postcolonial Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
29. But my non-consumption of beef did not, I should note, challenge the belief that beef - as a progressive, rational, wholesome choice - was 'modern', suggesting a notion of modernity more akin to that outlined by the Osellas. That is, while modernity was linked to ideas about Western progress, my informants also placed themselves formly as innovators and participants in modernity. See C. Osella and F. Osella, 'Once upon a Time in the West? Narrating Modernity in Kerala, South India', in The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (incorporating Man) Vol.12, no.3 (2006), pp.569-89.
30. See, for example, T. O'Toole, 'Secularising the Sacred Cow: The Relationship between Religious Reform and Hindu Nationalism', in Antony Copley (ed.), Hinduism in Public and Private (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), also available at http://www.sociology.ed.ac.uk/ sas/papers/papers25.htm, accessed 2/11/07
31. and P. van der Veer, Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
32. J.C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak. Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990).
33. Ibid., p.xvi.
34. M.B. Gillette, Between Mecca and Beijing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp.136-7.
35. Staples, Peculiar People, Amazing Lives.
36. David Mosse, 'Responding to Subordination: The Politics of Identity Change Among South Indian Untouchable Castes', in J.R. Campbell and A. Rew (eds), Identity and Affect: Experiences of Identity in a Globalising World (London: Pluto Press, 1999), p.76.
37. Gillette, Between Mecca and Beijing, p.162.
38. The Madigas, the cobbler and leather-working caste, was one of the two main Scheduled Castes in the area where I worked. The other was the Malas.
39. P. Roy, 'Meat-Eating, Masculinity, and Renunciation in India: A Gandhian Grammar of Diet', in Gender & History, Vol.XIV, no.1 (2002), p.66.
40. Ibid.
41. See, for example, D. Sutton, 'The Vegetarian Anthropologist', in Anthropology Today, Vol.XIIV, no.1 (1997), pp.5-8;
42. and D. Lupton, Food, the Body and the Self (London: Sage, 1996).
43. See F. Osella and C. Osella, 'Articulation of Physical and Social Bodies in Kerala', in Contributions to Indian Sociology (n.s.) Vol.XXX, no.1 (1996), pp.37-68.
44. 27 There are examples of this in other cultural contexts. See, for example, M.C. Cesaro, 'Consuming Identities: Food and Resistance among the Uyghur in Contemporary Xinjiang', in Inner Asia, Vol.II (2000), pp.225-38, which describes how Muslims in Xinjiang, China - a socially-marginalised group - are empowered by their refusal to accept food from the Han Chinese.
45. J. Morgan, Debrett's New Guide to Etiquette and Modern Manners (London: Headline, 1999).
46. Valentine E. Daniel, Fluid Signs: Being a Person the Tamil Way (London: University of California Press, 1987), pp.71, 184.
47. See Leviticus 11:7
48. and Mark 5:1-17.
49. Marvin Harris, 'The Cultural Ecology of India's Sacred Cattle', in Current Anthropology, Vol.7 (1966), pp.51-66.
50. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), p.58.
51. At least, that is, in theory: In practice, some of the less devout were as likely to ignore food rules in private as Hindus were to be lured by beef.
52. This was a criticism levelled more generally at Andhra cooks. During a visit to Kolkata in December 2004 I found myself defending the Andhra cuisine to Bengalis, one of whom dismissed it as being 'all fire and no taste'.
53. Mayer, Caste and Kinship in Central India: A Village and Its Region p.37.
54. See, for example, Daniel, Fluid Signs: Being a Person the Tamil Way
55. Zimmermann, The Jungle and the Aroma of Meats: An Ecological Theme in Hindu Medicine, p.183.
56. B.E.F. Beck, 'Colour and Heat in South Indian Ritual', in Man (n.s.) Vol.IV (1969), pp.553-72.
57. Daniel, Fluid Signs: Being a Person the Tamil Way, p.184.
58. Staples, 'Peculiar People, Amazing Lives'.
59. See, for examples, Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus, pp.146-9;
60. and Zimmermann, The Jungle and the Aroma of Meats.
61. C. Levi-Strauss, 'The Culinary Triangle', in Partisan Review, Vol.XXXIII (1965), pp.586-95.
62. S. Dube, Stitches on Time: Colonial Textures and Postcolonial Tangles (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004), p.10.
63. Arjun Appadurai, 'Gastro-Politics in Hindu South Asia', in American Ethnologist, Vol.VIII, no.3 (1981), pp.494-511.
64. Arjun Appadurai, 'Topographies of the Self: Praise and Emotion in Hindu India', in A.C. Lutz and L. Abu-Lughod (eds), Language and the Politics of Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p.101.