Culinary Innovation and Political Action in a Japanese Incarceration Camp

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Culinary Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

During World War II, the US incarcerated 120,000 Japanese Americans in 10 incarceration camps, a process that uprooted lives, separated families, and ruptured economic and cultural networks. Incarceration also shaped the culinary practices of incarcerees constrained by institutional oversight, the goals of camp administrators, racism, and other factors. We ask how studying food practices in one camp, the Gila River Incarceration Camp located on the Gila River Indian Community Reservation in Arizona, can inform understandings of this site and broader approaches to culinary archaeology. We combine faunal, material culture, and historical data to show how individual action and the labor of incarcerees drove innovation and change in camp cuisine. Whereas historical accounts suggest incarcerees had little choice in food in the camp’s early days, we show that small actions, from illicit cooking to hunting small game, led to relaxed camp rules and reshaped camp cuisine. Beyond highlighting the politics of food in institutional contexts, we also show how innovation and change at multiple levels can spring from small-scale actions. Ultimately, we argue that understanding ingredients, dishes, and flavors must be balanced with consideration of how context-specific politics shape the choices and possibilities of food choices in the past.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Culinary Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36444.0