http://mcu.sagepub.com/Journal of Material Culture

http://mcu.sagepub.com/content/14/2/219The online version of this article can be found at:

 DOI: 10.1177/1359183509103063

2009 14: 219Journal of Material CultureNir Avieli

and Religious Identity at the Protestant Christmas Picnic in Hoi An`At Christmas We Don't Like Pork, Just Like The MacCabees': Festive Food

  

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

can be found at:Journal of Material CultureAdditional services and information for    

  http://mcu.sagepub.com/cgi/alertsEmail Alerts:

 

http://mcu.sagepub.com/subscriptionsSubscriptions:  

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints:  

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navPermissions:  

http://mcu.sagepub.com/content/14/2/219.refs.htmlCitations:  

What is This? 

- May 27, 2009Version of Record >>

by Monica Mihaela on October 26, 2013mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from by Monica Mihaela on October 26, 2013mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from by Monica Mihaela on October 26, 2013mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from by Monica Mihaela on October 26, 2013mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from by Monica Mihaela on October 26, 2013mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from by Monica Mihaela on October 26, 2013mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from by Monica Mihaela on October 26, 2013mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from by Monica Mihaela on October 26, 2013mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from by Monica Mihaela on October 26, 2013mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from by Monica Mihaela on October 26, 2013mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from by Monica Mihaela on October 26, 2013mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from by Monica Mihaela on October 26, 2013mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from by Monica Mihaela on October 26, 2013mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from by Monica Mihaela on October 26, 2013mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from by Monica Mihaela on October 26, 2013mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from by Monica Mihaela on October 26, 2013mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from by Monica Mihaela on October 26, 2013mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from by Monica Mihaela on October 26, 2013mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from by Monica Mihaela on October 26, 2013mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from by Monica Mihaela on October 26, 2013mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from by Monica Mihaela on October 26, 2013mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from by Monica Mihaela on October 26, 2013mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from by Monica Mihaela on October 26, 2013mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from by Monica Mihaela on October 26, 2013mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from

‘AT CHRISTMAS WE DON’TLIKE PORK, JUST LIKE THEMACCABEES’Festive Food and Religious Identity at the ProtestantChristmas Picnic in Hoi An

◆ NIR AVIELI

Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Ben Gurion University, Israel

AbstractEvery Christmas, the tiny Protestant community of Hoi An (central Vietnam)congregates and marks the day with a service, a short ceremony and a com-munal picnic in the church yard. In this article, based on anthropologicalfieldwork conducted in the town since 1998, the author explores the meaningsof the culinary features of the event. By analysing the dishes and eatingarrangements at the picnic, he shows how differing facets of the participants’identity – the religious, the ethnic and the regional – are exposed, definedand negotiated. He argues that, while the eating arrangements representethnic Vietnamese identity, the dishes themselves hint at foreignness and‘double marginality’: not only of a Christian minority among Buddhists butalso of Protestants among Catholics. The author’s findings suggest that thecomplicated relationship between nation-states and marginal religious groups,as well as among members of differing religious communities within thesame ethnic group, are often expressed in subtle practices that are easily over-looked by outsiders but are meaningful and evocative for the participants.The discussion focuses on the meaning of the culinary arena as a sphere ofsocio-religious negotiation, especially within politically authoritative contexts.

Key Words ◆ food ◆ Protestantism ◆ religious identities ◆ Vietnam

219

Journal of Material Culture http://mcu.sagepub.comCopyright © The Author(s), 2009. Reprints and permissions:http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journals/journalspermission.navVol. 14(2): 219–241 [1359–1835 (200906) 10.1177/1359183509103063]

INTRODUCTION

Every year on Christmas day the members of the tiny Protestant (DaoTin Lanh: [the] Religion [of the] Good News) community of Hoi An incentral Vietnam congregate in their festively decorated church and cele-brate Jesus’s birth with a service and a ceremony awarding prizes to thebest pupils in the Sunday school. Anthropologists term such events ‘ritesof unity and renewal’: instances when community members symbolicallyreturn to their mythological place of origin, recount the myth of theircreation as a distinctive social group, reaffirm their shared values andgoals and reinforce intra-group commitment, cohesion and solidarity.

The ceremony over, the members of the Protestant community inHoi An share a meal, or rather a picnic, in the churchyard, where theyeat the same dishes every year. Such communal feasts are characteristicof similar events across cultures, regions and religions. However, whilethe formal stages of religious rituals and ceremonies have always been atthe very centre of scholarly attention, up until recently, the festive fooditself, as well as the eating practices, were ignored or, at best, treated asanecdotal and trivial by most anthropologists and students of religion.Even Richard Lee’s famous ‘Eating Christmas in the Kalahari’ (1990[1969]), which focuses on a Christmas feast, includes only two paragraphsdescribing the feast and the food prepared for it, while the bulk of thearticle is concerned with Lee’s complex relations with his Kung hosts.

Ignoring the culinary aspects of such events becomes even moreperplexing when one considers the relative amount of work and expenseinvested in festive meals compared to other stages and aspects of suchevents. While doing fieldwork in Hoi An, it was obvious to me that alarge part of money, effort and time was always invested in the prep-aration and consumption of the feast (for similar observations, seeAppadurai, 1981; Masquelier, 1995), and this was certainly the case forthe Protestant Christmas picnic discussed in this article. However, despitethe unequivocal centrality of the communal meal and the culinary prac-tices surrounding it, up until now festive food has rarely been treated asa meaningful subject of anthropological inquiry.

In this article, I explore the meaning of the culinary features of theChristmas picnic at the Protestant church in Hoi An. By analysing thedishes and eating arrangements at this ‘food event’ (Ashkenazi and Jacob,2000:7), I show how differing facets of the participants’ identity – thereligious, the ethnic and the regional – are exposed, defined and negoti-ated. I suggest that the complicated relationship between nation-statesand minority groups, whether ethnic and/or religious, as well as amongmembers of differing religious communities within the same ethnic group,are often embedded in subtle culinary nuances that are easily overlookedby outsiders, but which are meaningful and evocative for the partici-pants. Specifically, I show how the eating arrangements and dishes at

J o u r n a l o f M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E 1 4 ( 2 )

220

the Christmas picnic at the Protestant Church in Hoi An express theKinh (ethnic Vietnamese), Christian and Protestant facets of the com-munity members’ identity and create a sense of ‘double marginality’: ofa Christian minority among Buddhists and of a Protestant minorityamong Catholics.

The discussion is focused on the culinary sphere as a cultural arenawhich is highly susceptible to processes of cultural negotiation, commen-tary and criticism. I argue that these qualities of the culinary sphere areespecially important in politically authoritative contexts, where the stateoften competes with religious institutions over the loyalty and devotionof its citizens and where the interaction between centre and marginalgroups is often characterized by the regime’s repeated attempts to curbcompeting ideologies, and by subtle modes of resistance from the weakersocial groups and individuals.

FIELDWORK IN HOI AN

Hoi An is a prosperous market town of some 30,000 people,1 located inQuang Nam province in central Vietnam. The town served as an inter-national port long before the arrival of the Kinh (ethnic Vietnamese)sometime in the 15th century, and remained an important centre for inter-national commerce during the 16th to 19th centuries (Wheeler, 2006),when it was frequented by Chinese, Japanese, Indian and Arab traders,who were followed by Portuguese, Dutch, French and English merchants.Many of the Chinese traders settled in town and built houses, shops andcentres of worship, structures for which Hoi An was awarded UNESCOWorld Heritage Site status in 2000.

Hoi An was an important port of entry for Christianity into Vietnam.The Nguyen Lords who ruled these newly colonized parts of the countrydid not perceive Christianity to be a threat (at least, not until the 19thcentury), and the town saw the arrival of persecuted Japanese Catholicsas well as European missionaries in the early 17th century. A famousvisitor was the Jesuit priest Alexander de Rhodes, who landed in thetown in 1624, compiled the first Vietnamese–Portuguese–Latin lexiconand took part in the development of the Romanized Vietnamese script(Quoc Ngu) and the translation of the bible into Vietnamese.

During the French Colonial period, a modern deep-water port wasbuilt in neighbouring Danang. Hoi An’s importance as an internationalport declined and the town became a small yet prosperous provincialcentre with a tiny French quarter and garrison, later manned by UStroops. During the period of ‘economic collectivization’, launched afterthe national reunification in 1975, Hoi An went through a harsh decade:many of the town dwellers were involved in commerce and many wereof Chinese ancestry, two social echelons that were specifically targeted

Avieli: F E S T I V E F O O D A N D R E L I G I O U S I D E N T I T Y I N H O I A N

221

by the post-war regime. Since the early 1990s, the town has seen yetanother period of revival and became once again an important centre forinternational economic transactions, this time as one of the main touristhubs in the country.

The Catholic congregation in Hoi An currently has a few thousandmembers, a French-built cathedral and a bishop (locally reputed to beex-South-Vietnam President Diem’s personal priest in the early 1960s).The Protestant congregation is much smaller with some five or sixhundred members, a small church in town (with a non-resident pastorand regular services) and a couple of tiny churches in two of the district’svillages offering irregular services by occasional visiting preachers. In2008, a Hoianese community member was preparing to take the role ofthe parish pastor.

This article is based on extensive anthropological fieldwork carriedout in the town since 1998. My wife and I lived in Hoi An from 1999 to2000 and returned for shorter research periods from 2001 to 2007. I con-ducted anthropological participant observation based on lengthy periodsof stay in the town during which I established close personal relationswith many locals. During my stay in Hoi An, I made an intensive studyof the Vietnamese language, with an emphasis on the distinctive localvernacular Tieng Quang (Quang [Nam’s province] Language). I haveparticipated in hundreds of food events in different contexts, and con-ducted thousands of unstructured interviews and informal conversations.My informants belong to various social classes and differing religiousand cultural backgrounds.

The ethnographic data concerning the Christmas Picnic discussed inthis article were collected in Hoi An before and during Christmas 1999.Early on Christmas day I went to church and spent the morning and earlyafternoon observing the events, sharing the meal, talking to people, takingnotes and pictures, and videotaping. A few days after Christmas, I con-ducted an unstructured interview with a friend who is a member of thecongregation and we discussed some of the events, as well as issuesconcerning the menu. Later on, I spoke with several members of theCatholic and Protestant communities in town and discussed some of thequestions I had regarding their festive praxis, social status and religiousidentity. Due to the comparative nature of my research, my analysis isalso based on systematic comparison of the Christmas picnic at theProtestant church and to other festive and non-festive meals that I havedocumented over the last decade.

One of the benefits of conducting ongoing, long-term anthropologicalresearch in a specific location is the ability to return to the field periodic-ally, to follow processes of continuity and change, and pursue questionsand issues that come up while writing and analysing ethnographic datacollected earlier. Thus, in 2008, after presenting earlier versions of this

J o u r n a l o f M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E 1 4 ( 2 )

222

article in several settings, I returned to the town and conducted five semi-structured interviews with specific community members, two of whomheld important positions2 in the parish, as well as some conversationswith my key informants. In these interviews and conversations, I focusedon issues, comments and questions raised by various readers of earlierdrafts of this article.

FESTIVE FOOD AND RELIGIOUS IDENTITIES

Food, like the air we breathe, is essential and vital for our survival. Foodis also the most perfect cultural artifact, the outcome of a detailed differ-entiation process, whereby wheat grains are transformed into Frenchbaguettes, Italian pasta or Chinese dumplings that encompass our person-al, social and cultural identities: ‘The way any human group eats’, pointsout Fischler (1988: 275), ‘helps it assert its diversity, hierarchy andorganization . . . food is central to individual identity, in that any humanindividual is constructed biologically, psychologically and socially by thefood he/she chooses to incorporate.’

The power of food is epitomized in the process of incorporation(literally: ‘into [the] body’), in which culturally transformed edible mattercrosses the borders of the body (p. 279), breaching the dichotomy between‘Outside’ and ‘Inside’, between ‘the World’ and ‘the Self’. No other culturalartifact penetrates our body in such an immediate, direct and intensemanner. ‘A man is what he eats’ goes the saying, suggesting that whilewe eat, we become the most perfect consumers of our culture, physicallyinternalizing its principles and values, swallowing and digesting theminto our bodies.

For example, when Hindu adherents take their pure vegetarian meal,they express their commitment to the sanctity of life and to the value ofnon-violence, while a Jew or a Muslim, when ensuring that the meatthey are about to purchase or eat has been slaughtered and processedaccording to the demands of Kashrut or Halal, re-demarcate the bordersof inclusion of their respective religious communities and reconfirmtheir loyalty to the demands of their faiths, along with the ideals, valuesand practices they entail.

It is precisely the essential and immediate nature of eating, the fact thatfood is a basic daily need, consumed routinely and non-reflexively, whichseems to have defined the culinary sphere as trivial and unworthy ofscholarly attention. Anthropologists were always inclined to explore‘serious’ issues such as kinship, religion or language and tended tomention foodways only as a matter of fact, all too often ignoring theirsignificance and meaning.

In recent years, the anthropology of food is flourishing (Mintz andDu-Bois, 2002), while scholars of religion are increasingly aware of food’s

Avieli: F E S T I V E F O O D A N D R E L I G I O U S I D E N T I T Y I N H O I A N

223

importance in different religious spheres (Sack, 2001; Kraemer, 2007).While this emerging interest has evolved after many years of neglect,eating constitutes such an important and ubiquitous part of the humanexperience, and especially of religious ceremonies, that many religion-oriented ethnographies feature elaborate descriptions of festive dishesand of feasting.

Since the onset of the discipline, anthropologists acknowledged theplace of food in the contexts of taboos, sacrifice and communion (Goody,1982: 10). Both Frazer (1963[1922]) and Robertson Smith (Goody, 1982:11) point to the role of the festive meal as allowing and enhancing com-munion between men and their gods, between the living and the dead,and amongst the living members of a given society; Robertson Smitheven coined the term ‘commensality’ to describe how humans ate withtheir gods. Durkheim (1995[1915]) pointed out that the basic function offestive food was to distinguish between the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane’,and in his work with Mauss (Durkheim and Mauss, 1963[1903]) stressedthe relationships between food taboos, totems and kinship systems.

Food taboos caught the attention of many prominent anthropologists(e.g. Radcliffe-Brown, 1948; Turner, 1969; Douglas, 1975; Harris, 1987),whose interest in taboos is probably an outcome of the Durkheimianlegacy that perceives the sacred as forbidden (Evans, 2003). However,although the study of taboos is important, it seems that this line ofresearch led to very little beyond general dichotomies (such as feasting–fasting, pure–impure or excess–moderation) that didn’t say much aboutthe meanings of festive food.

Feeley-Harnik (1995), in her essay on the anthropological perspectiveson food and religion, suggests that anthropologists approached food andeating in religion from one of three angles: as a taboo, which set peopleapart sexually and socially; as a means of communion/commensality,which unites strangers into family-like constituencies (p. 568) and allowstranscendence and union with the gods themselves; and as a means ofsocial distinction à la Bourdieu. Bahloul (1995a: 634) integrates Feeley-Harnik’s first two categories by suggesting that food is a metaphor inreligious disputes, that (in Judaism) ‘food prescriptions and prohibitions. . . serve as a legal system’ and that consuming ritual food is ‘designed toallow the embodiment of the idea of the belief in God’. Thus, she claims,‘eating kosher (legal) food is fulfilling God’s prescriptions and ingestingthe very idea of God’. These ideas, and especially the notion that foodserves as an important means for fine distinction amongst and withinreligious groups, are further developed by Bahloul in another article(1995b), to which I return later in the article.

While Feeley-Harnik and Bahloul’s ideas are important and insight-ful, what is still clearly missing in the anthropological research of festivefood is precisely that which anthropology praises itself for noticing:

J o u r n a l o f M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E 1 4 ( 2 )

224

micro-analysis of unique local dishes consumed by specific groups atparticular times in specific locations, and which define the local under-standing of religion, of God and of the diners’ religious identities. Indeed,some scholarly attention was given to the meaning of iconic festive dishes,such as milk, in Islam (Hoffman, 1995), human flesh among the Aztec(Carrasco, 1995), turkey in the American Thanksgiving (Siskind, 1992)and, of course, blood and bread in Christianity and Judaism (e.g. Salamon,1993; Vialles, 1994; Feeley-Harnik, 1995; Sack, 2001). However, theseprojects are concerned with the common and general and therefore tendto be very broad in their perspective. We still know very little about thevast array of festive foods consumed in religious contexts in differentparts of the world and about their meanings for those who prepare andconsume them. This article takes a step towards filling this gap.

THE CHRISTMAS PICNIC AT THE PROTESTANT CHURCH

It was Christmas morning and we walked to the small Protestant church.Thuy, a receptionist in our guesthouse and a close friend, told us thatevery year there is a ‘picnic’ in the churchyard on Christmas day andinvited us to join the service and the meal.

The small church was decorated with Christmas ornaments: chainsof flickering lights, a Christmas tree, a shining red star over the door anda large poster of the three kings entering the barn by the altar. It waspacked with men in dark suits and ties, women in winter ao dai (longtunic – Vietnam’s neo-traditional national dress) and children in coatsand knitted hats. A choir of young girls in white ao dai sang beautifullyand the pastor preached. The pastor was then joined by Santa Claus andthey both distributed prizes to the students who had excelled at Sundayschool. The ceremony over, everyone went out to the backyard of thechurch for the ‘picnic’.

There were over 30 round tables in the shaded courtyard, set withcolourful plastic bowls, spoons and wooden chopsticks. On each tablethere was a plate of thinly-cut thit bo tai (underdone [roast] beef), a bowlof mam nem (fermented fish sauce dip: turbid and odorous fermented fishmash, a stage in the processing of Vietnamese fish sauce or nouc mam,mixed with chilli, sugar, ginger and limejuice into a powerful sweet–pungent–salty dip), a few banh da (rice crackers) and a plate of rau song(fresh aromatic greens) mixed with slices of unripe star fruit and greenbananas. A couple of women in conical hats were cooking something ina huge iron barrel over a wood fire in a makeshift kitchen in a cornerof the yard. Loud Christmas carols (‘Jingle Bells’ in Vietnamese) filledthe yard.

The community members took their seats: the elderly men sat by thetables closest to the church wall, as did the elderly women. The others

Avieli: F E S T I V E F O O D A N D R E L I G I O U S I D E N T I T Y I N H O I A N

225

went to the tables further away in the yard, same-sex tables graduallyturning into mixed ones as younger husbands and wives took seatstogether with their toddlers and babies. A separate table had been erectedfor the schoolchildren. When everyone was seated, the music stoppedand the pastor took the microphone to say the blessing, while everyoneput their hands together and bowed their heads in silence.

As soon as the prayer ended, the feast began. Chopsticks were usedto pick up the chewy pieces of meat, dip them in the pungent sauce, placethem on a torn piece of rice cracker, top them with herbs and eat. Thedish cooked in the barrel was ca ri bo (beef curry). Several young menserved it to the people at the tables in large soup bowls, along with slicesof baguettes. The diners poured the thick broth into their personalbowls, ate it with their spoons and used the bread to mop up the left-overs. When I asked my co-diners why these specific beef dishes wereeaten at Christmas, I was told by Son, a student at Danang University:‘At Christmas we don’t like pork!’ His friend Huong added: ‘Maybebecause the Maccabees3 refused to eat pork’. Thuy, our host, told melater: ‘I don’t know why, but ever since I was a child, we have alwayseaten bo tai and ca ri bo in the church on Christmas day.’

Within a mere five minutes after the blessing, the first elderly menrose to leave. They walked past an iced-tea container by the gate, had asip of green tea, bade farewell to the pastor who was standing by thegate and left. The others followed and soon there were only some youngmen clearing up the dishes and several women washing them up.

EATING LIKE KINH (ETHNIC VIETNAMESE)

The picnic at the Protestant church followed the form and structure ofa Kinh feast. Such events, held routinely on ancestor worship days (DamGio), weddings and other life cycle and family events, are the most fre-quent occasions when the boundaries of inclusion of the extended familyare demonstrated and when belonging to a specific social group isexpressed, maintained and intensified (Avieli, 2007). Partaking in thesefeasts can be perceived as a kind of ‘membership card’ of the extendedfamily or social group.

As the shared pot of rice represents the communal character of theVietnamese family and as the sharing of food among family members isthe utmost expression of mutual responsibility and dependency, extendedfamily and community feasts are instances in which these principles areexpanded so as to include wider social circles. So, those sharing suchmeals make the following ‘culinary statement’: ‘we are like a family: weare responsible for one another, we share our food and, hence, our fate.’In this sense, the Christmas picnic was, first and foremost, an expressionof commensality.4

J o u r n a l o f M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E 1 4 ( 2 )

226

Beyond social integration, the eating arrangements at such feastsreflect some of the basic organizing principles of Vietnamese society, mostprominent of which are age hierarchy and precedence of the elderly overthe young. The older guests take the most respected seats: ‘above andbeyond’, as close as possible to the ancestral altar, and are served firstand foremost, often concluding the meal before the younger guests haveeven started. While in non-Christian Kinh ceremonies the ancestral altaris the focal point of the event, in the Christian context it was the church’saltar that served as the Eliadean cosmological centre. At the Christmaspicnic, the most respected community members sat at tables closest tothe church and the altar.

At this point, it should be noted that in Kinh worship, the ancestors’spirits and/or the gods are invited to share the meal. Therefore, the foodis first set on a table in front of the altar of the ancestors or deities and,only later, when the transcendent beings have consumed their share(Avieli, 2007), are the living members invited to partake in the meal. How-ever, food was not offered on the church’s altar, nor were there any of theother Kinh votive-paper offerings. This point is extremely important and Iwill return to it when discussing the religious ideas embedded in the feast.

The second organizing principle concerns gender hierarchy and thepriority of men over women. In Vietnamese feasts, women are routinelycharged with cooking the food and serving it to the other family members,while men, and specifically elderly men, are served and looked after.Cooking is carried out in the kitchen, located in a separate structurebehind the house, just by the toilet and the pigsty. All cooking activitiesare done on the floor, in a squatting position, in a space which is oftenthe darkest, dirtiest, physically lowest and socially lowliest part of thehouse. Thus, the inferior position of women or, rather, as Ortner (1974:80–3) suggests, their ambivalent position of being responsible for trans-forming nature into culture, is enacted in the kitchen and reinforcedduring public events, such as the picnic at the church, where womencooked and served the food with the help of young men.

It would be wrong to argue that these eating arrangements reflectclear-cut male dominance. In fact, in Vietnam the principle of age prom-inence is more important than that of gender hierarchy. For example,women do not eat when the men have finished but, rather, at the sametime, with the older female participants sitting just as close to the altaras the older men and served with food right after them, and before theyounger men. Moreover, while the women cook, younger men take onthe duty of serving the food to both men and women. Hence, it would bemore accurate to say that at the picnic at the church, just like in all otherKinh feasts, it is the prominence of age that is honoured, followed bygender differentiation and hierarchy: the young men and the womenserve the old and then the men, in this order.

Avieli: F E S T I V E F O O D A N D R E L I G I O U S I D E N T I T Y I N H O I A N

227

When I mentioned that these were family-feast eating arrangements,Thuy, our host, responded: ‘The Protestants in Hoi An are one family,so we eat like a family’ (original emphasis). Yet the question that comesto mind concerns the nature of this ‘family’. Though the Hoianese Protes-tants, whose religion was introduced to the country by Western mission-aries, could have opted for eating like a Western family (e.g. husbands,wives and children sharing a table, with the women serving the men andchildren), the age and gender hierarchies that structured the event wereclearly Kinh. At the Christmas picnic, the Hoianese Protestants ate as ifthey were a Kinh family, and this should be understood as a fundamentalculinary statement concerning the participants’ self-definition: ‘we eatlike a Kinh family because we are Kinh Protestants’.

EATING LIKE CHRISTIANS

Though the structure and eating arrangements at the picnic were thoseof a Kinh family feast, the content of the meal deviated significantlyfrom the common Hoianese festive menu. These changes in content areimportant and meaningful and call for some elaboration.

While studying the Hoianese food arrangements, I gradually realizedthat, in spite of the great differences between life cycle events such asancestor worship, weddings, birth ceremonies or new house inaugura-tions, the menu for the feasts that are always central in such events isquite uniform and usually features the following dishes: starters of porkcold-cuts (cha), spring rolls (ram) and a salad (tron, literally ‘mix’/’toss’);a whole chicken or duck served with eggs; several dishes of boiled orroasted meat, served with fresh greens (rau song); a dish of stir-friednoodles, often cooked with string beans (dau tai); beef la gu or ra gu(apparently after the French ragout): a thick beef stew cooked with carrots,potatoes and onion, seasoned with cinnamon, star-anise, ginger, garlic,turmeric, fish-sauce and cilantro, and always served with slices of freshbaguette (again, French-introduced) that are used to mop up the gravy.In some cases, a stew made of the very same ingredients but seasonedsomewhat differently is called ca ri bo (beef curry). This dish too isalways served with a baguette; sweet dishes, such as fruit or cakes wereoften served as dessert (trang mieng, literally washing [the] mouth).

I have shown elsewhere (Avieli, 2007) how each and every festivedish has its own meaning and, at times, several meanings at various levels.Thus, for example, pork expresses thriftiness and efficiency, as well asfertility, while fowl-and-egg dishes represent good parenting and devotedmothering, and noodles and string beans stand for longevity. Together,these dishes stand for the core Vietnamese values of Phuc Loc Tho(happiness, prosperity and longevity). Concomitantly, the huge amountof lavish food, the prominence of expensive dishes and the salience of

J o u r n a l o f M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E 1 4 ( 2 )

228

meat of domesticated animals stand for generosity and prosperity as wellas power and supremacy, along with the social status they represent.

Although the Christmas picnic was arranged along the lines of aKinh feast, the dishes served clearly deviated from the common Hoianesefestive menu. First, there were only two dishes at this meal, as the slicedbeef, rice-crackers, fish-sauce dip and greens are the components of asingle dish – thit bo tai (undercooked beef) – while the beef stew and breadmake up ca ri bo (beef curry); this is in contrast to the large number ofdishes served at Kinh life-cycle feasts. Second, while ra gu and, at times,ca ri bo, are an integral part of the Hoianese festive menu, this was theonly time that I saw thit bo tai served at a feast. Moreover, although cari bo is a festive dish, both dishes served at the picnic belong to the ‘fastfood’ category: ca ri bo can be purchased daily as a breakfast dish in acouple of stalls in town while thit bo tai is a local speciality in the neigh-bouring town of Dien Ban, some 10 km west of Hoi An, where it is soldby a dozen special restaurants as a fast meal for those travelling up anddown the country on Highway 1, linking Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.

Before I turn to the meanings of these dishes, it is important to notethat, even though I participated in the Christmas picnic only once, I wasrepeatedly told that the menu for the event was constant and alwaysincluded just these two dishes. When enthusiastically inviting us to cometo the picnic in 1999, Thuy told us that these two beef dishes would beserved and added: ‘This is what we always eat at Christmas at thechurch.’ During the picnic itself, I asked several of the participants aboutthe menu and had similar responses. In 2008, all my interviewees saidthat the picnic had featured these two specific dishes ever since theycould remember.

The very limited number of dishes, as well as the fact that both belongto the fast food category, reflect the relatively low magnitude of the event:if the huge and lavish meal at family feasts expresses family cohesion andmutual responsibility in the form of redistribution of wealth, it seems thatat the Christmas picnic, the level of commitment, reflected in the expenseand effort invested in the food, was significantly lower. Thus, despiteThuy’s claim that the Protestants in Hoi An eat like a family becausethey see themselves as a family, the magnitude of the meal suggests thatthe communal bonds are weaker than those of an extended family. Froma different perspective, if a sumptuous feast is a token of the fierce socialcompetition for status that characterizes the Vietnamese ‘prestige econ-omy’ (Jamieson, 1995), it seems that the Protestant community is notconsidered a very important arena for such competition.

Of course, this does not mean that the Christian characteristic of theparticipants’ identity is unimportant. In fact, in my conversations andinterviews with community members, they kept stressing how import-ant Yessu (Jesus) is in their lives, how they partake regularly in the parish

Avieli: F E S T I V E F O O D A N D R E L I G I O U S I D E N T I T Y I N H O I A N

229

activities and services, and how the community members have strongrelationships with each other. They also insisted on showing me signsof their faith as, for example, when I was shown a sticker saying: ‘Jesussaves you’ (in English) on a motorbike helmet. A non-Christian friendwho helped me to set up meetings with community members evencomplained how, as soon as she explained the purpose of the requestedmeeting, the people she contacted started telling her ‘about Yessu, andabout God, and talked so much that it was very hard to end the conver-sation’.

It seems that being Christian and Protestant is an extremely import-ant part of each community member’s identity, demonstrated amongother things by wearing crosses, going to services and routinely partici-pating in life-cycle events of other community members. But the festivemenu suggests that belonging to the Hoianese Protestant community isof somewhat lesser importance than, for example, belonging to anextended family.

Yet, despite the low ranking of the event in terms of the number ofdishes, the food itself encompassed a measure of sophistication andprestige that should be explained. First, both dishes have foreign origins.Ca ri bo, as its name clearly indicates, has Indian roots and a mild Indianflavour. Bo (‘beef’ – from the French bovine) was probably introduced toVietnam by the French, along with baguettes. This dish thereforecombines French and Indian ingredients, as well as French cooking (longsimmering) and eating style (mopping up the sauce with the baguette).

Undercooked beef is a ‘local specialty’ (dac san) of another town:Dien Ban. Although a couple of places in Hoi An also sell this dish, I wastold in 1999 that the beef and other ingredients for the Christmas picnicwere purchased in Dien Ban. In 2008, I was also told that the previouscouple of years the number of participants at the picnics exceeded 500and that two whole cows had been bought and cooked especially for theevent. The meat, however, was not roasted in the churchyard but else-where; there were different suggestions as to where it was cooked. I wasrepeatedly told that it was cooked ‘by people from Dien Ban’, and somepeople even claimed that it was cooked in Dien Ban, ‘where they haveall the necessary equipment’. This dish is therefore ‘twice foreign’: notonly is it a beef recipe, with the inherent French origins, but it is alsothe ‘local speciality’ of another place.5

With both dishes featuring beef as the central ingredient, we arereminded of Bahloul’s (1995b: 488) analysis of the preference of beefover mutton for ritual meals among Maghrebian Jewish immigrants inFrance, which, she argues, is shaped by their ‘desire . . . to distinguishthemselves from the Maghrebian Muslims’, who prefer mutton. Rejectingmutton, she points out, ‘conveys a sense of distinction vis-à-vis Muslimsand underlines a strategy of self-identification as “progressive” (the French

J o u r n a l o f M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E 1 4 ( 2 )

230

term evolué), as opposed to what was viewed in colonial times as thebackward lifestyle of the Muslims’. In an interview conducted in 2008,one of the community seniors responded to my specific question regard-ing the link between beef and French culture by saying: ‘The Protestantsin Hoi An are a modern group, so they choose modern food such as beef.’

It appears that, for both the Maghrebian Jews in France and theHoianese Protestants, beef is a means of distinction that sets them apartfrom adjacent social groups (Maghrebian Muslim immigrants in Franceand non-Christian Vietnamese, respectively) while associating them withthe French, along with the notions of progress and civilization that Frenchculture imparts to its ex-colonial subjects.

Beef stands also for luxury and conspicuous consumption and I wasrepeatedly informed that thit bo thai and ca ri bo were chosen for theChristmas picnic because beef is expensive. For example, I was told byone of the community seniors that the custom of having a picnic in thechurchyard at Christmas started ‘many years ago’ (probably in the1930s), when leaders of the three parishes in Hoi An district decided ‘tomeet and discuss things at Christmas . . . As beef was rare and expen-sive, the Pastor decided to serve ca ri bo and thit bo thai to give them agood meal’ (emphasis added). He later added that, in Hoi An, pork disheswere nha que (a derogatory term for country dwellers, reminiscent of‘country bumpkins’) food and, as the Protestant community is rich, theyopted for expensive fare.

According to another community member whom I interviewed in2008, beef is expensive and rare in Hoi An, and the pastor decided toserve beef dishes at the Christmas picnic in order to let the communitymembers ‘have a good meal and feel rich’. She also pointed out that ‘atChristmas there are many donations and so the church has enough moneyto purchase expensive meat.’ From a slightly different perspective, anon-Christian friend suggested that ‘the Protestants in Hoi An are poor,so they serve beef at Christmas because they want everyone to think thatthey are rich.’

To sum up, there are several reasons for choosing ca ri bo and thitbo tai for the Protestant Christmas meal. First, both dishes feature expen-sive and high ranking beef and are therefore sufficiently luxurious andspecial for a feast. Second, beef, baguettes and Christianity were intro-duced to Vietnam by the French. Thus, it is appropriate to serve food ofFrench origin at a feast celebrating a French-introduced religion. Third,Christianity is also implied by the fact that both dishes were structuredalong the Christian culinary concept of ‘bread and meat’. While my infor-mants never suggested that these dishes adhere to such culinary struc-ture (see note 5), they must be aware of it, mentioning it daily in theirblessings (Xin cho chung toi ngay nao du banh ngay ay or Give us todayour daily bread) and weekly in the Communion. Finally, while the beef,

Avieli: F E S T I V E F O O D A N D R E L I G I O U S I D E N T I T Y I N H O I A N

231

baguettes and ca ri are obviously of foreign origin, choosing a dishbrought over from out of town (that is, from Dien Ban) further stressesthe foreignness of this community.

EATING LIKE PROTESTANTS

The points made so far explain why members of a Christian communitymight opt for these dishes for their communal feast but they do not fullyexplain the Protestant features of the selected dishes. Here, I would liketo suggest that beyond the notion of belonging to a minority group, whichis probably experienced by all Vietnamese Christians (and expressedby the various levels of foreignness imbued in the food), the HoianeseProtestants see themselves as a distinct religious group, ‘a minoritywithin a minority’, an aspect of their communal identity that is stressedby the festive fare.

At the picnic, I was told that beef was chosen not because it wasforeign or French but, rather, in opposition to pork. Although Christians,including the Hoianese Protestants, do not consider pork unclean, it wasrejected on the community’s most important day. When I asked why theyate beef at their Christmas feast, Son a 22-year-old student at DanangUniversity, who approached us during the service, told me that ‘we don’tlike pork at Christmas.’ When I asked why, he replied: ‘because theMaccabees refused to eat pork’. This shunning of pork and the explan-ation for it hint at the distinctive religious identity of the Protestants inHoi An: they consider themselves to be different and, in a sense, better,or rather, purer than the other Hoianese, and most importantly, thanthe Catholics.

A good example would be their attitude to ancestor worship, whichis clearly the most common and important religious practice in Vietnam(Avieli, 2007: 121). While discussing ancestor worship, a 40-year-oldProtestant female trader in the municipal market told me with a dis-approving look on her face: ‘We don’t worship our ancestors . . . we don’tbelieve in such things.’ The trader on the stall next to her, also a Protes-tant, overheard the conversation and said: ‘Even the Catholics have altarsin their houses.’

It is true that many of the Hoianese Catholics have ancestor altarsin their homes. Although these altars often display photographs of theirdeceased ancestors, icons of Jesus and the Virgin Mary are always foundabove these photographs. It should also be noted that many Buddhistsarrange their altars in a similar way, placing the icon of Buddha on thehighest level of the altar, above the pictures of their ancestors. ThoughI have seen ancestral altars in some Protestant houses, most of myProtestant acquaintances do not worship their ancestors. This rejectionof ancestor worship is a clear statement regarding their self-perceptionas more devout, purer and different from both Buddhists and Catholics.

J o u r n a l o f M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E 1 4 ( 2 )

232

In 2008, I discussed this notion of the Hoianese Protestants’ self-perception as purer and more devout than the Hoianese Catholics with asenior community member. The men and his family members wereclearly satisfied when I pointed out that the Protestants, as opposed to theCatholics, do not worship their ancestors. He went on to say:

We are very different from the Catholics. For example, the Protestants inHoi An do eat holy bread at their services, but we do not call it banh Yessu(Jesus’s bread) like the Catholics . . . we also drink only grape juice and notwine, and we don’t consider it to be blood.

Here again, he suggested that the meaning of the ritual food derives fromthe principles of faith and that, while the Hoianese Catholics believe thatthey actually consume Jesus’s flesh and drink his blood, the Protestantsconsider it to be a symbolic act. ‘Thinking about the meaning’, he added,‘is more important than the food.’

This purist self-perception sets the background for a feeling of a‘minority within minority’: not only of Christians among non-believers/heathens, but also of Protestants among Catholics. As this identifyingfeature is set vis-à-vis the Hoianese Catholics, the choice of beef cannotbe explained merely by its French/foreign origins, which would workjust as well for the Catholics but, rather, by an intra-Christian rationale:for example, like the Maccabees, whose uprising against the Syrians wassparked by an attempt to force them to sacrifice a pig (Kraemer, 2007:31), which would have polluted their temple, their bodies and their souls,the Hoianese Protestants reject pork in their most important communalfeast so as to distinguish themselves from the Catholics as purer and moredevout. In 2008, a senior community member commented on my ques-tion regarding the shunning of pork at the picnic: ‘At first it was for-bidden to eat pork, blood and animals without hooves; then Jesus allowedus to eat everything. But at Christmas we would rather not eat pork.’

Here I should point out that I was really surprised when, in responseto my questions regarding the preference for beef dishes, I was told thatit was in defiance of pork and followed the Maccabean model. As an IsraeliJew, married to a wife who struggled to eat Kosher food while in HoiAn, this unexpected activation of Jewish myths and dietary laws seemedextremely out of context. While I gradually came to understand how therejection of pork and the Maccabee model worked so as to create a Protes-tant communal identity (purist, devout, ‘minority within minority’), Ifeel that my position as a Jewish researcher calls for some reflection.

Though not a religious person, I must admit that interacting with theChristians in town, and especially with the members of an intimateProtestant community, was not easy. In fact, on that Christmas day, thepriest invited me to hand out the prizes to the best students of the Sundayschool and I found it embarrassing, feeling that I was deceiving my hosts.Later on, during the picnic, I was invited by a young community member

Avieli: F E S T I V E F O O D A N D R E L I G I O U S I D E N T I T Y I N H O I A N

233

to his forthcoming wedding. When we arrived at the wedding a weekafter Christmas, we were treated as guests of honour and seated at thepastor’s table. Once the first set of dishes was served, the pastor handedme the microphone and asked me to say the blessings. I responded thatI was Jewish and that I didn’t know the blessings. Though pretendingthat everything was OK, the pastor and the other people sharing our tablewere obviously uncomfortable and upset and didn’t really talk to us allthrough the meal. We were very embarrassed and couldn’t wait to leave,which we did as soon as we felt that this would not further aggravate thesituation. Why was it easier for me to participate in Buddhist, Cao Dai orancestor-worship ceremonies than in Christian ones? I suppose that, justlike the Hoianese Protestants, my Jewish identity had greater difficultiesin facing its ‘significant others’: the Christian ‘traditional foes’ but ‘closerelatives’, rather than those belonging to totally different spiritual worlds(for a similar understanding of the relationship between Jews, Italian-Catholics and Chinese in New York, see Tuchman and Levine, 1993).

Returning to the issue of religious culinary identities, the Christmaseating patterns of the Hoianese Catholics further highlight the Protestantsingularity. The Catholic community has no communal feast (a fact thatimplies a relatively low level of cohesion), but quite a few Catholics toldme they would have a family meal at home after the evening mass. Iwas told that the traditional dish for Christmas dinner is ca ri ga: chickencurry eaten with slices of baguette. Serving only one dish for the Christ-mas feast further hints at the relatively low magnitude of this eventamong the Hoianese Catholics. Furthermore, this dish is hardly festiveas it is commonly consumed for breakfast at several commercial foodvenues around town. It seems again that the Indian connection andFrench ingredients (onions, carrots, potatoes and baguette), as well as therelative high price of chicken make it expensive and special enough fora feast, and foreign enough to express the foreign origins of Catholicismin town.

I was invited for a Christmas dinner at the house of a Catholic familythat operates a tourist-oriented restaurant in town. For some reason, themeal never materialized as family members kept coming and going, eachgrabbing their own portion and eating alone. Eventually, I was invitedto sit down with the grandfather, and a dish of xoi dau xanh (sticky ricewith mung beans) was served to each of us in a small saucer. I asked himwhy this dish was served for the Christmas meal and he replied: ‘Everyyear we eat ca ri ga (chicken curry) but someone told me two weeks ago:why do you eat ca ri ga for Christmas? You should eat xoi dau xanh (stickyrice with mung beans), this is a Gregorian dish. So I told my daughtersto cook it tonight!’

I suggested earlier that serving only chicken curry for the Christmasfeast reflects the relative unimportance of this event for the Hoianese

J o u r n a l o f M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E 1 4 ( 2 )

234

Catholics but my hosts had taken a step further in ‘downgrading’ thismeal. Xoi dau xanh is cheap peasant breakfast fare, hardly appropriate fora feast.6 Thus, serving this dish further diminishes the magnitude of theCatholic Christmas meal and, with it, of the holiday and its importancefor the local Catholics.

The grandfather claimed that this was a ‘Gregorian dish’. Whetherhe meant that ‘Gregorian’ was ‘French’ or a favourite of the Pope Gregory,he invested xoi dau xanh with a new and prestigious meaning, distancingit from the everyday. In this way, he upgraded the dish and, with it, theimportance of the entire event. In any case, the point is that Christmasculinary customs among the Hoianese Catholics were less elaborate byfar than those of the Protestants.

While a Christmas feast generally distinguishes the Hoianese Chris-tians from the other town dwellers, the different festive dishes andfeasting styles highlight the differences between the Protestants and theCatholics of Hoi An and stand for two different Christian identities: thefamily-oriented, intimate, ‘purist’ and ‘minority within minority’ Protes-tant identity, and the less crystallized and less devout, ‘more local thanforeign’ Catholic one.

DISCUSSION: FOOD AND RELIGIOUS IDENTITIES INVIETNAM

At this point, it is important to stress how sensitive and problematic issuesof religion and religious identity-politics are in contemporary Vietnam.As opposed to a not-so-distant past, religion is not perceived any moreas exploitative ‘opium for the people’ and the Vietnamese constitutiongrants freedom of religion. At the same time, the actual attitude of theregime towards religious activities is ambivalent, with religion perceivedas having positive and negative sides.

Some aspects of religion are defined as ‘spiritual’ and ‘cultural’ andare considered personally positive, socially stabilizing and culturally ade-quate. Indeed, culture (van hoa) is not only a buzzword in contemporaryVietnamese official discourse regarding social instability, increasing mater-ialism and the erosion of tradition, but also a profitable asset that gener-ates economic activity and attracts tourism as well as domestic and foreigninvestment. Therefore, across the nation, temples have been restored andmaintained, and religious festivals are allowed and even encouraged. Atthe same time, other aspects of religion are treated with more suspicionand concern, deemed as superstitious and exploitative, and hence nega-tive, antisocial and even dangerous.

Yet when it comes to the practicalities of the freedom of religion, theofficial attitude seems to tilt towards the restrictive side. A good examplewould be the official and practical stance regarding len dong, a resurgent

Avieli: F E S T I V E F O O D A N D R E L I G I O U S I D E N T I T Y I N H O I A N

235

and ever more popular form of spiritualism (Fjelstad and Nguyen, 2006),whose practitioners and adherents have a complex relationship withvarious governmental agencies, some more tolerant, while others areactive and even brutal in their attempts to curb or, at least, contain thephenomenon.

This distrustful and restrictive attitude is especially evident in thecase of Christianity. Christianity is not seen or promoted as a part of theVietnamese national heritage but, rather, as a foreign and, for that matter,colonial legacy. Moreover, Christianity is not seen as a potential sourceof income, even though my experience is that Christian tourists are inter-ested in local communities and churches and are big donors for varioussocial projects initiated by local churches. Here again, I believe that thecolonial and neo-colonial contexts of missionary activities can explainmuch of the opposition to Christianity and Christian activities in Vietnam.

Since the beginning of 2007, it seems that a new campaign waslaunched against civil rights activists, with Christian priests among theprime targets. Some scholars have suggested in VSG discussions7 that therecent signing of agreements with international organizations such asWTO ended a period when government agencies were very circumspectwith respect to human and civil rights, and started yet another age ofpersecution, now that the threat of ‘not signing’ or ‘not accepting’ Vietnamdue to civil-rights transgressions has been removed. While the authoritieswere surprisingly lax in 2005 when hordes flocked to Saigon’s NotreDame Cathedral to see the apparent miracle of a statue of the VirginMary shedding tears, decisive and brutal acts occurred in May 2007 inretaliation to events or protests on a much smaller scale.

However, while the government is carefully monitoring Christianactivities, one realm seems to be relatively free from supervision andcensorship: the domain of cooking and eating. Just like most anthropol-ogists, the authorities tend to take culinary arrangements for granted andthus fail to see the implicit subtext embedded in festive fare.

It is important to stress that I am not suggesting that such ‘culinarysubversiveness’ was planned or even conscious: I don’t think that thiswas a counter-hegemonic ‘culinary conspiracy’ by the Protestant com-munity and its leaders. In fact, when I suggested my interpretation to someof the community leaders and members in 2008, they were genuinelysurprised and, like most informants in most culinary contexts, keptpointing to tradition (‘this is what we always eat at Christmas’) and topractical explanations: ‘it is easy to prepare these dishes for so manypeople’, ‘these dishes are suitable for big meals’ or ‘it is not convenient(khong thuan tien) to eat pork at Christmas’ (the last quote being a goodexample of how ‘practical reason’ is shaped by cultural frameworks:when I asked why was it more convenient to cook beef than pork, I nevergot an answer and the conversation would turn in other directions).

J o u r n a l o f M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E 1 4 ( 2 )

236

Yet the fact that no one, including the organizers and participants offeasts, considers the social and cultural meaning of food is exactly thereason for the privileged position of the ‘culinary perspective’, especiallywhen it comes to authoritarian regimes such as the post-revolutionaryVietnamese. Because eating is routine, mundane and taken for granted,the culinary sphere is hardly monitored and, therefore, more susceptibleto innovative or challenging ideas and so often becomes an arena forsocial critique, negotiation, challenge and even conflict.

As I elaborated my ideas, the community members I spoke to admittedthat my interpretation of ca ri bo and thit bo tai as standing for French-ness and for the foreign nature of Protestantism in Vietnam made senseand reflected many of the ideas they held regarding their community asbeing progressive, civilized and of high social status. They also made itclear that they perceive themselves to be different from the HoianeseCatholics: purer and more devout.

However, as ‘this is only food’ (as I am often told by people from allwalks of life, inclusive of many social scientists), ideas that would other-wise have been considered controversial, subversive and unacceptable,can be expressed and, hence, observed, when analysing the culinarycontent of social events. In this respect, studying the culinary character-istics of social events is not only appropriate, but actually of great poten-tial: being among the least censored cultural realms, it is in this culturalsphere that ideas which are otherwise unacceptable find their expression.

CONCLUSION: WHY FOOD?

The Christmas picnic at the church was a celebration of the HoianeseProtestant identity. When the community members gathered together,shared a meal and ate the food, they exposed, reaffirmed and incorpor-ated practically and materially the essence of being a Hoianese Protestant.As opposed to more conventional vessels of religious identity (symbolssuch as the cross, icons of Jesus, the star or Santa Claus, ritual objectssuch as the grail or communion bread, texts and prayers or participationin services, Sunday school or life events of other community members),which are explicit and hence liable to supervision, foodways and dishesat the picnic have been shown in this article to be exceptionally flexibleand multi-vocal, conveying varied and, at times, contradictory ideas thatreveal much about the ways in which the Hoianese Protestants thinkabout themselves.

While the eating arrangements suggest that community members con-ceive of themselves as belonging to the Kinh majority group, along withits core values (the importance of the family and its cohesion, age andgender hierarchies, generosity as well as competition for prestige), thedishes hint at the foreign/French origins of Christianity in Vietnam.

Avieli: F E S T I V E F O O D A N D R E L I G I O U S I D E N T I T Y I N H O I A N

237

However, it was the choice of ‘foreign dishes’, one of which was actuallybrought from out of town, and, more importantly, the shunning of pork,which suggest not merely a desire for distinction, but also to show purityand devotion and even their willingness to sacrifice themselves for theirfaith like the Maccabees.

The question is: ‘why food’? What singles out the culinary sphere asan appropriate arena for the negotiation of complicated, multi-vocal andcontroversial ideas? This question is further accentuated when consider-ing the specific Vietnamese political context. The authoritative Vietnameseregime would hardly tolerate the discussion of religious identities inany other socio-cultural realm. What is it, then, that makes the culinarysphere both flexible and relatively free of censorship even in authori-tarian political contexts? In order to answer these questions, we shouldreturn to some of the basic qualities of food as a cultural artifact.

First, the elastic and dynamic nature of food makes it a perfect vesselfor complicated and polysemic ideas. Food, as opposed to most othermaterial artifacts, is a matter in constant, fast-paced change (Lévi-Strauss,1966; see also Clark, 2004). ‘Raw’ is transformed into ‘cooked’ and/orto ‘rotten’, and the cooked is eaten (digested and defecated) or discarded(before/after rotting) within a few hours. Moreover, food is less prescribedand canonized than most other cultural artifacts, always featuring greatpersonal, local and regional variation. Thus, ‘season according to taste’ isan instruction that follows even the most meticulous recipe. These quali-ties – flexibility, dynamism and variability – allow for exceptional agilitywhen it comes to symbolic meanings. It is the elasticity of the meansthat makes for the elasticity of meanings.

Second, the very same qualities that led anthropologists and othersocial scientists to ignore this domestic, routine and unassuming domainexplain the relative licence of food to express ideas that would not havebeen tolerated in any other socio-cultural arena. It is the mundane andfeminine nature of cooking as well as the perishable nature of food thatdefine the culinary realm as non-important, non-threatening and there-fore less in need of control.

Paradoxically, it is precisely this taken-for-granted and transientnature of cooking and eating that facilitates the expression and nego-tiation of problematic, sensitive and even forbidden issues within theculinary sphere. Therefore, it is within the culinary arena that some ofthe most important ideas that members of a given society or culture holdabout themselves are demonstrated and endorsed.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to my colleague Jackie Feldman and to the two anonymous review-ers for their comments on earlier drafts of this article.

J o u r n a l o f M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E 1 4 ( 2 )

238

Notes

1. Up until 2007, Hoi An was officially defined as a ‘town’ (Thi Xa) and thecapital of Hoi An district, comprising the town and seven villages with apopulation of some 100,000 people. In 2008, the district was adminis-tratively rearranged, with Hoi An now designated as a city (Thanh Pho) ofsome 70,000 people, while only 30,000 people are still categorized as villagedwellers.

2. Names, ages, positions and, at times, gender, were changed so as to ensurethat the privacy of those people who were kind enough to share with metheir knowledge, ideas and thoughts is maintained.

3. Maccabee was the name attributed to the priestly family of Hashmonai, wholed the Jewish revolt against the Greek-Seleuks during the 2nd century BC,which ended in Jewish victory, national independence and the restorationof the Temple in Jerusalem. According to the Book of Maccabees, Matityahu,the Hashmonai patriarch, refused an order by a Seleuk officer to sacrifice apig in his town temple, slaughtered the officer and run away with his fivesons, the Maccabees, to the mountains, from where he launched therebellion (Kraemer, 2007: 31).

4. Obviously, some of those invited to such feasts are only offered an ad hoc‘membership card’ or, alternatively, are perceived as guests and are treatedas such – outsiders who are temporarily allowed some access.

5. Are the locals aware of the ‘foreignness’ of these dishes? Postmodern anthro-pologists might challenge my claim for two reasons: they will require thatthe locals would explicitly ‘say’ that these dishes are ‘foreign’; and they wouldrightly question the whole notion of the ‘local’. As opposed to the Judeo-Christian cultures, from which most anthropologists originate (or, at least,within which most of us are trained), where verbal explanations and writteninterpretations are an integral part of everyday life, members of othercultures might be less verbal and even reluctant to talk and/or comment onissues which interest anthropologists. In Vietnam, for example, men arerequired to control their mouths and to say (and eat) as little as possible, astoo much talking is feminine. Women, however, have to be reserved whenspeaking to men. In any case, as a male anthropologist I had to deal timeand again with these cultural conventions. As for the idea of ‘the local’:while I embrace wholeheartedly the postmodern notion that things are notstable and essential but, rather, fluid, dynamic and unstable, it seems to methat dishes ‘brought from elsewhere’, whose names clearly maintain theirforeignness, are incorporated into the local system as representations of‘elsewhere’. In this sense, eating a dish called ca ri or choosing a local special-ity of another place and purchasing it over there (because, over there, ‘it tastesbetter’ – as one of the participants told me) are clear indications that thelocals are well aware of the foreignness of these dishes.

6. It should be noted that xoi dau xanh is sometimes served at the altar (but notat the table) in ancestor-worship rituals, probably as a traditional dish anda favorite of the ancestors. Alternatively, as sticky rice (nep) is consideredthe ‘real’ rice, its ceremonial role can be explained in terms of its ancestralposition as the origin of all rice.

7. Vietnamese Studies Group <http://www.lib.washington.edu/southeastasia/vsg> is a very active virtual community of researchers interested in Vietnam.

Avieli: F E S T I V E F O O D A N D R E L I G I O U S I D E N T I T Y I N H O I A N

239

References

Appadurai, A. (1981) ‘Gastro-Politics in Hindu South Asia’, American Ethnologist8(3): 494–511.

Ashkenazi, M. and Jacob, J. (2000) The Essence of Japanese Cuisine: An Essay onFood and Culture. Richmond: Curzon.

Avieli, N. (2007) ‘Feasting with the Living and the Dead’, in P. Taylor (ed.) Modernityand Re-Enchantment: Religion in Post-Revolutionary Vietnam. Singapore: ISEASPress.

Bahloul, J. (1995a) Book Review: ‘The Lord’s Table: La Conservation alimentairetraditionelle au Liban and Food from the Mouth of Krishna’, American Ethnol-ogist 22(3): 634–5.

Bahloul, J. (1995b) ‘Food Practices among Sephardic Immigrants in Contempor-ary France: Dietary Laws in Urban Society’, Journal of the American Academyof Religion LXIII(3): 485–96.

Carrasco, D. (1995) ‘Cosmic Jaws: We Eat the Gods and the Gods Eat Us’, Journalof the American Academy of Religion LXIII(3): 429–63.

Clark, D. (2004) ‘The Raw and the Rotten: Punk Cuisine’, Ethnology 43(1): 19–31.Douglas, M. (1975) Implicit Meaning. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Durkheim, E. (1995[1915]) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Free

Press.Durkheim, E. and Mauss, M. (1963[1903]) Primitive Classification. Chicago: Univer-

sity of Chicago Press.Evans, M. (2003) ‘The Sacred: Differentiating, Clarifying and Extending Concepts’,

Review of Religious Research 45(1): 32–47.Feeley-Harnik, G. (1995) ‘Religion and Food: An Anthropological Perspective’,

Journal of the American Academy of Religion LXIII(3): 565–82.Fischler, C. (1988) ‘Food, Self and Identity’, Social Science Information 27(2):

275–92.Fjelstad, K. and Nguyen, T.H. (2006) Possessed by the Spirits: Mediumship in Contem-

porary Vietnamese Communities. New York: SEAP Publications, Cornell Uni-versity Press.

Frazer, J. (1963[1922]) The Golden Bough. New York: Macmillan.Goody, J. (1982) Cooking, Cuisine and Class: A Study in Comparative Sociology.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Harris, M.B. (1987) The Sacred Cow and the Abominable Pig: Riddles of Food and

Culture. Tel Aviv: Massada (in Hebrew).Hoffman, V.J. (1995) ‘Eating and Fasting for God in Sufi Tradition’, Journal of the

American Academy of Religion LXIII(3): 465–84.Jamieson, N. (1995) Understanding Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California

Press.Kraemer, D. (2007) Jewish Eating and Identity through the Ages. New York:

Routledge.Lee, R.B. (1990[1969]) ‘Eating Christmas in the Kalahari’, in J.P. Spradly and D.W.

McCurdy (eds) Conformity and Conflict: Readings in Cultural Anthropology,pp. 7–30. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman & Little Brown.

Lévi-Strauss, C. (1966) ‘The Culinary Triangle’, Partisan Review 33: 586–95.Masquelier, A. (1995) ‘Consumption, Prostitution and Reproduction: The Poetics

of Sweetness in “Bori”’, American Ethnologist 22(4): 883–906.Mintz, W.S. and Du Bois, C.M. (2002) ‘The Anthropology of Food and Eating’,

Annual Review of Anthropology 31: 99–119.Ortner, S.B. (1974) ‘Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?’, in M.Z. Rosaldo

and L. Louise (eds) Women, Culture and Society, pp. 67–87. Stanford, CA:Stanford University Press.

J o u r n a l o f M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E 1 4 ( 2 )

240

Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. (1948) The Andaman Islanders: A Study in Social Anthro-pology. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.

Sack, D. (2001) Whitebread Protestants: Food and Religion in American Culture.Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Salamon, H. (1993) ‘Blood among Betha Israel and their Christian Neighbors inEthiopia’, Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Folklore, pp. 117–34. Jerusalem: Instituteof Jewish Studies (in Hebrew).

Siskind, J. (1992) ‘The Invention of Thanksgiving’, Critique of Anthropology 12:167–91.

Tuchman, G. and Levine, H.G. (1993) ‘New York Jews and Chinese Food: TheSocial Construction of an Ethnic Pattern’, Journal of Contemporary Ethno-graphy 22(3): 382–407.

Turner, V. (1969) The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. New York: Walterde Gruyter.

Vialles, N. (1994) Animal to Edible. London: Cambridge University Press.Wheeler, C. (2006) ‘Re-thinking the Sea in Vietnamese History: Littoral Society

in the Integration of Thuan-Quang, Seventeenth–Eighteenth Centuries’,Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 37(1): 123–53.

◆ NIR AVIELI teaches in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, BenGurion University, Israel. Since 1998 he has conducted research work in Viet-nam, but also in Thailand, India, Singapore and Israel. He is currently writingon Vietnamese gender and Vietnamese tourism and compiling a (partial) culinaryethnography of Israel. Publications include: ‘Food in Tourism: Attraction andImpediment’ (with Erik Cohen), in Annals of Tourism Research (2004), ‘Vietnam-ese New Year Rice Cakes: Iconic Festive Dishes and Contested National Identity’in Ethnology (2005) and ‘Feasting with the Living and the Dead’ in P. Taylor (ed.)Modernity and Re-Enchantment: Religion in Post-Revolutionary Vietnam (Institute ofSoutheast Asian Studies, 2007). Address: Department of Sociology and Anthro-pology, Ben Gurion University, PO Box 653, Beer-Sheva 84105, Israel. [email:avieli@exchange.bgu.ac.il]

Avieli: F E S T I V E F O O D A N D R E L I G I O U S I D E N T I T Y I N H O I A N

241