One Tamale, Four Digestions

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Thinking about Eating: Theorizing Foodways in Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Drawing from long-established fields in anthropology (structuralist, semiotic, identity-oriented, subsistence-focused, human ecological, and many others), food scholars have actively developed hybrid perspectives and novel pursuits. Here, I focus on four: modeling foodways linguistically, theorizing gastropolitik, situating the agency of food, and considering the emergence and ramifications of gastronomic heritage. I present an overview of each approach: the origins, the grounding literature, and the general framework. I then address how each has been mobilized in archaeological investigations, using several case studies. By addressing the applications and implications of these approaches in theorizing food, I highlight what each can help to accomplish in foodways research as a complementary perspective to other paradigms and understandings. I suggest how these toolkits might contribute directly to interpreting cultural logics and improvisations, understanding the role of food in sociopolitics, expanding notions of agency, and critically applying ancient foodways research to issues in the contemporary world. I use a single tamale meal—whose residues were recovered archaeologically from the Classic Maya city of Piedras Negras—as the focus of these ruminations.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Thinking about Eating: Theorizing Foodways in Archaeology

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32161