Foodscapes, Foodfields, and Identities in the YucatÁn. Steffan Igor Ayora-Diaz
of Mexico, as a world apart, as suggested by the epigraph (from Moseley and Terry 1980b: 1) at the beginning of this introduction.24 However, this was not the case. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Yucatecans perceived Mexico as an interventionist, colonialist power that sought to undermine the economic autonomy of the state and to remove regional elites from positions of authority, putting in their place either individuals and families from Mexico or Yucatecans who were sympathetic to the centralist project of the national government. In the context of this antagonistic relationship, the Yucatecan elites expanded their commercial and cultural ties with Europe, the United States, and the Caribbean, in particular with Cuba, Puerto Rico, Colombia, and Venezuela. The peninsular market with Europe, mediated by Cuba and Belize, fostered the inclusion of European ingredients into the regional cuisine. While the culinary field spread all over the state, it was in cities where the wealthy lived that the inchoate gastronomic field began to emerge. The dishes that today are iconic of the Yucatecan gastronomic field developed, gradually, in Mérida, Motul, Ticul, and Valladolid, the main cities of the state of Yucatán.25 Hence, Yucatecan identity and gastronomy need to be seen as a two-pronged construction: on the one hand, they underline the specificities of local culture and society and local-cosmopolitan relations; on the other, they affirm the Yucatecans' opposition and resistance to central Mexican culture and power structures. In this historical context, food in Yucatán, as elsewhere, plays an important part in drawing the boundaries of Yucatecan culture and in shaping the cultural politics that defines who belongs to that culture and who is excluded from it (Ayora-Diaz 2009).
The Performance of Research in Yucatán
Traditionally, ethnographic fieldwork has been conducted in distant places, within cultures that are typically different from the anthropologist's home society and culture. For many years anthropologists have been inclined to deploy rhetoric and practical strategies to make fieldwork at home acceptable, masquerading the familiar as exotic. This enterprise was considered necessary so long as anthropology was understood to be a discipline concerned with the ‘Other' (di Leonardo 1998). The reflexive critique of anthropological and other cultural texts, which began in the late 1970s, made it possible to question and refashion the definition of anthropology's task (Clifford 1988; Clifford and Marcus 1986; Fabian 1983; Marcus and Cushman 1982; Marcus and Fischer 1986; Said 1978). No longer concerned with classifying and ordering otherness, some anthropologists, from one wing of the anthropological spectrum, sought to redefine the discipline as an interpretive task (Geertz 1973; Rabinow and Sullivan [1979] 1987).
To reach an understanding of local culture, it is necessary for the anthropologist to engage in intersubjective, dialogic negotiations of meaning (Clifford 1988; Tedlock and Mannheim 1995). We anthropologists must grasp the native's understanding of the world in order to represent it (Geertz 1983). Although this ambition has been both strongly criticized and forcefully defended (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Geertz 1990; Marcus and Fischer 1986), there is some consensus on the need for anthropologists to get as close as possible to the native's perspective. At the same time, in the name of the ‘science' of anthropology, some anthropologists defend the contention that a sense of distance has to be preserved to allow for critical reflection and analysis. The directive to preserve the geographical distance between the observer and the society that he or she observes has complicated the ambition to grasp the local point of view. To find their ‘Other', anthropologists are forced to travel geographically and to displace themselves in time. For a long period, it was not deemed acceptable to look closer to home, as the early reception to Campbell's (1964) and Friedl's (1962) work illustrates. Both were criticized for studying Greek rural society, which was not exotic enough for the rigidities of the anthropology of their time. This proscription survives today, as often anthropologists who study their own society (which could be any so-called Western/ized society) are accused of seeking comfortable places. A segment of the academic status quo tends to dismiss studies that focus on shopping malls, kitchens, urban homes, restaurants, musical productions, and many strands of consumption-related issues. National or regional identity has become a regular topic to study somewhere else, but it is still largely proscribed ‘at home'—unless the research is being conducted among marginal or ethnic groups (see Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Passaro 1997).
I find, however, that there are advantages in approaching my ‘own' culture. I have partaken of the general embodiment and naturalization of taste, as have most Yucatecans. I grew up in an environment in which Yucatecan meals were the norm and the ‘proper' taste and texture were always expected. However, after living 14 years abroad and in another Mexican region (Chiapas), and, moreover, after becoming an anthropologist, I was able to slip between my local knowledge of food culture and moral values and my ‘expert' knowledge as an anthropologist who cannot bracket historical and political contexts and conditions that are critical in establishing cultural ‘necessities'. Hence, given that my main concern in this book is to explore the relationship between a form of cultural production and consumption (Yucatecan gastronomy) and the ways in which it intersects with the local politics of identity, I have sought to unpack the local structures of the social field, to trace its transformations, and to explore the strategies that seek to establish the boundaries of what locally they/we construct and understand as ‘regional culture' and local cultural productions.
To describe the gastronomic field, I have had to deal with at least five levels of ethnographic engagement, which often blurred into each other during everyday forms of interaction. I observed and discussed (1) the recipes and ingredients that domestic cooks and consumers of food consider to be Yucatecan in the private domain; (2) the recipes and culinary elements that restaurant managers and chefs consider to be Yucatecan in a public sphere ruled by the catering industry; (3) the dishes that the print media, radio, and television (local, national, and international) promote as part of the regional culinary tradition; (4) the recipes, ingredients, and techniques that cookbook writers represent as being Yucatecan in a traditional and authentic sense; and (5) the components of the gastronomic field that the bureaucratic and cultural institutions of the nation-state and the state of Yucatán recognize as such. These five levels are present in my analysis of the foodscape and the culinary and gastronomic fields. Although there is an abundance of layers of meaning in the constitution of the gastronomic field, in this volume I pay specific attention to the part played by cookbooks and restaurants. A greater emphasis on the ways in which Yucatecan gastronomy is constructed in different media (e.g., on television and radio shows and in newspaper columns written by cultural brokers who have been authorized by the local government to speak as appointed ‘chroniclers' of Mérida) was beyond the scope of this project and will be left for future research. However, from the examples presented in this volume, I would suggest that the importance of the media is to contribute to the cultural constructs instituted primarily by cookbooks and restaurateurs.
In Yucatán, as in many other places, people love to talk about food. It is treated not simply as a source of nourishment but as a pleasurable activity to be shared with relatives and/or friends in different contexts and, often, to be remembered (Sutton 2001). For example, on one's return from travels to other places, friends will ask about how pleasurable the trip was. Food is usually viewed as an important dimension of the experience of travel, and it is not uncommon to hear a narration that describes what the traveler ate each day of the week and the dishes that she or he missed while away from home. As I noted above, many families have members who are recognized as ‘experts' in the preparation of a certain dish or a number of dishes. These experts find gratification in this recognition and strive to maintain their privileged position within the family, so that they will always be needed on special days. Some are called upon for specific days of the week, while birthdays and special days of the year are occasions when these members of the family are counted on to perform their culinary art for the pleasure of relatives and friends (e.g., during the celebration of Independence Day, invitations from those who have mastered central Mexican recipes, such as pozole or chiles en nogada, are much appreciated). On these special days, friends anticipate an invitation to eat this or that Mexican or Yucatecan dish that they lack either the know-how or the patience to prepare. Also, in anticipation of the Day of the Dead and All Saints' Day, relatives put pressure on the women or men who know how to cook mucbil pollos (a special chicken tamale) so that the dish can be enjoyed at that time of the year. These experts enjoy talking about their cooking abilities and are always passionate