Joanne Finkelstein (1989) 'The Meanings of Food in the Public Domain'
For God’s sake, thank you to Erasmus of Rotterdam for inventing basic table manners and also to Catherine de Medici for inventing the fork. Otherwise we might all still be spitting stuff under the table, ripping flesh from a bone with one hand and ripping of a piece of bread supported by the guidance of a large knife. We might still be burping, farting, scratching our scrotums and poking stuff out from between our teeth with the aid of the same knife we might use to prong another piece of steaming flesh.
As Mary Douglas (1972:61) has pointed out: ‘If food is treated as a code, the messages it encodes will be found in the pattern of social relations being expressed. The message is about different degrees of hierarchy, inclusion and exclusion, boundaries and transactions across the boundaries.’ This is brilliantly expressed in the Pizza scene within Wog Boy, where Steve is invited to dine out with the Government people, but cannot relate to the posh food served. As a result he rings his friend Frank to order a number of Pizzas for himself and guests who are looking for a hearty meal rather than a pompous dinner. Frank shows up in his singlet, balancing a pile of Pizza cartons, while his friend Steve is dressed in a smoking. Frank doesn’t realize the situation and addresses his friend in a casual way and Steve politely asks him to leave as he disturbs the mood. Frank – of course – takes it as an insult. This is a brilliant scene to demonstrate class as it is perceived in a restaurant.
‘Sennett (1976:23) has described how previously women were not well accepted in public: In the restaurants of the nineteenth century, a lone, respectable woman dining with a group of men, even if her husband were present, would cause an overt sensation, whereas the dining out of a bourgeois man with a woman of lower station was tacitly but studiously avoided as a topic of conversation among any of those near him.’
Joanne Finkelstein (1994) 'Dining Out'
...no comment.
Margaret Visser (1991) 'Ritual'
…can’t find reading
What kind of material would you use for a research on how the Shane Warne scandal broke? Newspapers – they are there in the library. Trace how a scandal unfolded (use different sources of newspaper).
Find out how women’s magazines deal with a scandal.
Readers are men or women or from different social background – newspapers will try to address their target group.
In your assignment move beyond pure description. Make clear how narratives are related to each other.
Who’s cast the role of hero and villain? How are women presented?
Research methodologies:
· Ethnography: Take a notepad and/or a camera with you. "Hawthorn experiment": Do workers increase their output under different lighting? Hawthorn effect.
· Semiotic analysis: Images, clothes and fashion – studying Goths and finding out about symbolic etc.
· Narrative analysis: About how stories are told – find out about the pattern. Relation between characters – what do we actually learn from the film, play, radio show?
· Tabulated data (ABS, data I already have in my course reader, A.C. Nielsen). Clearly identify the dependent and the independent variable. Independent variable is doing the explaining.
Present your finding as clearly as possible.
Ethics: Get an ethics clearance for the kind of research that you are doing. Awareness about the impact of the researcher on the research is crucial.
Observation rather than interviewing. For an interview you will need a permission from UNI.
Reflexivity – being aware of your own self, your own emotions and prejudices as a part of the project.
Getting on to the next chapter - Food
Prior lessons were about popular culture – now we will dig deeper into examples of popular culture.
Introducing Margaret Visser. Sociological significance of food. Finkelstein quotes the classic people discussing gastronomy. “Tell me what you eat and I tell you what you are.’
What is elegant food? French cuisine e.g. – is meant to be more refined.
National symbols: Vegemite, Pies, BBQs (the rituals around it)…
Authentic and Fake Food.
The sociology of eating might look at nutritional discourses (the way we talk about/discuss something).
How do reasonable or sensible people eat?
Eating has become sexy through the media.
Food tends to become prototyped. Why would you have a particular red wine with a particular red meat?
Gastronomic knowledge is a source to find out about how and why we eat the way we do.
Taboos derived from religion have an impact on the preparation and presentation of food (kosher, Halal…)
Comments: Lecture 11 – MP3
Case studies on food and shopping.
The phenomenon of Dining out and is there a reaction on fast food.
Classification of people into different society groups based on the food they eat, also, what sort of people go to fast food restaurants?
On Margaret Visser: She goes to dinner with one of her colleagues and the colleague brings her son, who picks up the spaghettis with his hands. Embarrassment: child doesn’t know the ritual codes of eating in a restaurant.
What is a ritual? Morning Prayer, going to church – defined in the social sciences as any social event that as a clearly defined beginning and end and appears over time.
Habits are things that we repeat more unconscious and there is less magic associated to it.
What is ritualized about dinner? Invitation, arrival, the order of the dishes, when one can begin, how much to eat…
However, formal and casual dinners are rituals: Even a picnic or casual dinners are rituals (it is the way we prepare us for it)
Why are codes important in the discussion of food? The child who picked up the spaghettis with its hands didn't know the codes. Codes become more explicit when people don’t confirm. Codes are very important when people don’t follow them. When people don’t follow them they become very clear. The ritual and its codes can be used by groups to determine who you let into your socal circle. This is plain snobbery. Different groups have different ways of snobbery, subculture will consume a beverage or a drug in a different fashion than others, defining whether or not you fit this particular subculture group.
It’s not just enough to know the rules. Acceptance can only be achieved if the candidate is confident to obey to the rules in an easy and confident way.
Emily Poster's etiquette book explains exactly what to do with your mouth at the table. Interestingly today we still keep to this etiquette unconsciously as we were brought up with this sort of etiquette, in the aim not to offend anybody else at the table with gross behavior.
Visser says that the mouth is a boundary line between the outside and the inside of the body. The gate through many substances may pass in, but shouldn’t come out again.
On Elias: Visser has a more micro-interaction observations. Elias goes on more generic aspects – the macro observations. Looking at the society in general.
He looks at etiquette in books from the 1500s. Eg Erasmus of Rotterdam, who wrote a book pitched at young males of the upper class, cultivating them to be a civilized individual. On the other hand it’s fine to fart at the table in his times. Erasmus calls the change in behavior or the trend in society at the beginning of the modern age, a civilizing process: Human beings trying to show that they are human beings by acting less and less like animals. To have the capacity to control your urges. Suppression might also be the reason for pornography, alcoholism, drug abuse etc. These habits cause embarrassment if people find out about it.
Elias talks about the internalization of manners.
On Dining out
Finkelstein….
Fastfood: McDonalds atmosphere is very easy to recognize. It is the same all over the world.
Finkelstein says that there is a trend away from home prepared food. Pizza Hut, McDonald, Hungry Jacks are becoming dominant in popular culture. They are now becoming nutrition conscious (Subway).
In pre-industrial society the whole family might have engaged in producing harvesting and preparing food, while nowadays it grows across the counter, warmed up and ready to eat.
Finkelstein suggests that we are loosing sociability through this trend.
McDonaldisation (first coined by Ritzer in 1993): .Forget about modernism and postmodernism, forget about technological society – we live in a McDonaldised society.
The principals of fast food restaurants increasingly dominating western society and the world.
What is the logic? What Max Weber coined the rationalization of society. Calculative or instrumental rationality. The most efficient means for achieving a given end.
We not only see it in food, we also see the trend in leisure like popular music (which is sort of standardized).
Following Weber, bureaucracy would be the key to modern society. Interstingly, following the lecture and the description of Webers thoughts reminds me of Brazil, a 1985 film by Terry Gilliam of Monthy Python’s fame.
Hint on the way sociologists use terms:
If words end on …sation, it means that everything is moving into one direction, a trend.
Unidirectional accounts like McDonaldisation tend to ignore counter tendencies. So they also grossly generalize, which means that they should be carefully discussed.
Good counter tendencies in terms of Fast Food would be the desire to eat healthy, also the desire to have authentic food experiences.
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