Foodscapes, Foodfields, and Identities in the YucatÁn. Steffan Igor Ayora-Diaz
long-established unity rooted in a common ethnicity or an ancestral territory, nor are they based on only one religion. Rather, they are constituted within a public sphere that articulates contemporary notions of citizenship and a mode of peoplehood that invokes common icons or symbols. These communities are imagined on the grounds of shared historical experiences, religious instruction, educational programs, exposure to different media, and active policies deployed by a state that aims to produce, through its institutions, a controllable population (B. Anderson 1983; Habermas [1962] 1989). With its shifting national boundary, several coexisting Christian religions (the number of Muslims is slowly growing), and more than 30 indigenous languages challenging Castilian Spanish's hegemony, the Mexican nation can hardly claim a strong primordial connection binding ethnicity, the nation, and the state.
The social sciences and the humanities provide multiple entry points into the questions of the nation and nationalism. In an early introduction to the sociological problem of ‘nationalism', A. Smith (1983) identified three different approaches seeking to overcome its theoretical neglect: the developmental approach (in two varieties, modernization and uneven development), the communitarian approach, and the conflict approach, represented, respectively, by scholars who were influenced by Marx, Durkheim, and Weber. According to Smith, the previous neglect could be understood due to the development and hegemony of strong modern nation-states during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, the fragmentation of nation-states that ensued following the implosion of the Soviet Union during the late twentieth century led to the growing preoccupation with the question as to whether nationalist movements were resurging or obsolete (Gellner 1983; Hobsbawm 1990; A. Smith 1996a).
As scholars recognized that nationalism was not a vanishing ideological form, they were forced to produce different theories to explain its contemporary endurance. A. Smith (1999) grouped the new lines of study on the basis of the foundation each had in differing explanations of nationalism. The models he identified were based on (1) primordial alliances, (2) perennial self-understandings, (3) a close tie to the modern condition (including the modernity of the form of the nation-state), and (4) ethno-symbolic constructions and sentiments. The first two models explain national identity as foundational cultural essences and racialized differences; the third views nationalism as a product of the modern relationship among nation, state, territory, and sovereignty; and the fourth grounds the new force of nationalism in ethnicity. A common premise of the primordial, perennial, and ethno-symbolic approaches is that there exists a line of continuity (sometimes despite fractures and recurrences) between enduring, historically based ethnic identities and the contemporary nationalist claims that different groups advance (Llobera 2004; A. Smith 1996b, 1999). In some cases (see, e.g., A. Smith 1999), the emergence of the modern state is understood as an effect of nationalist movements. However, some studies suggest that the transformation of old, pre-modern forms of political, religious, commercial, and bureaucratic organization into modern states makes use of nationalist feelings to legitimate the enforcement of boundaries, the imposition of taxes, trade protectionism, and the expansion of political and military control over other territories (Armstrong 1982; Hobsbawm 1990; Llobera 1994; Wallerstein 1987). As Hobsbawm (1990: 10) put it: “[N]ationalism comes before nations. Nations do not make states and nationalisms but the other way round.”
It was during the invention of the modern state that cultural, political, and commercial elites engaged in the process of inventing the nation by promoting a common language and religion and by adopting forms of territorial administration that sought to erase, or at least silence, difference (Pease 1992). The modern nation-state emerged from a process of domination, assimilation, and subordination of its internal others. These practices were instituted in today's France, Italy, Spain, and Belgium before the model of the modern nation-state was exported to the world (Badie 2000; Duggan 1994; Llobera 2004; Weber 1976). Mexico was not to be an exception to this experience (Mallon 1995). As I have already shown, when central Mexican elites gained control of the state, they sought (and continue to seek) the construction of a homogeneous nation, whereby cultural affinities are emphasized and differences silenced (Alonso 1994). In consequence, Yucatán's particular history of strong relations with the Caribbean, the US, and Europe has been politically and historically silenced. This process of subordination and cultural colonization is reflected in the construction of a national cuisine that analogously silences Yucatán's regional specificities.
I agree with Lie (2004) that modern society presents individuals with the possibility of creating multiple attachments and belonging to many strata. In this sense, modern peoplehood is “a floating signifier [that serves] to denote disparate conceptualizations about its principal predicates and substantive meanings” (ibid.: 269). This understanding allows for a broad definition of peoplehood that shares attributes with other forms of identity but which is none of them. Lie (ibid.: 1) writes: “By modern peoplehood I mean an inclusionary and involuntary group identity with a putatively shared history and distinct way of life. It is inclusionary because everyone in the group, regardless of status, gender, or moral worth, belongs. It is involuntary because one is born into an ascriptive category of peoplehood…It is not merely a population—an aggregate, an external attribution, an analytical category—but, rather, a people—a group, an internal conviction, a self-reflexive identity.” The basis of peoplehood is not found in religion, language, or territory, but in “common consciousness” (ibid.: 15). Restricted forms of peoplehood, what Lie calls “minority peoplehood,” can be traced to forms of “majority peoplehood,” from which minority groups fashion strategies affirming their own identity against that of the majority (ibid.: 251). As I have already suggested, the majority peoplehood that Yucatecans have taken as a prototype for their own peoplehood is not that of Mexico, but rather that of modern European nations, such as France and England.
Lie's definition of peoplehood both coincides with and supplements B. Anderson's (1983) definition of the nation as an imagined community. A common consciousness can be created through different media and the constitution of a public sphere. It is by means of the latter, instituted as a national forum, that problems, issues, and solutions are conceptualized, instrumented, and legitimated. As R. Smith (2003) points out, the chosen narrative form is often that of history, which typically includes an account of the emergence of a group in ancestral times and of the perils and tribulations experienced during the foundation of its collective self-consciousness.27 At the same time, history endorses the construction of a national identity that, at least until the second half of the twentieth century, silenced minority forms of peoplehood, imposing consistency where it was found missing (see also Duara 1995). The political invention of modern nation-states has often relied on the assimilation of difference into the culture, social organization, values, and forms of administration and political control of a dominant center.
Cuisine and food have often played an important part in the iconic representation of the values, essence, and soul of a particular society. Thus, a growing literature explores the different instances in which modern nation-states have reformed their food, constructing national cuisines in order to attain unity by reducing and subordinating the diversity of cultures within the territory of the state to the culture of the metropolis. Ferguson (2004), for example, has shown how the emergence and consolidation of French haute cuisine was tightly associated with the values and taste preferences of Parisian society. This was a society that enjoyed the benefits of a centralized structure that regulated national and colonial resources and facilitated the flow of foodstuffs from all regions of France into Paris. Even the United States, a nation built by immigrants from different regions of the world (some forced to immigrate, such as African slaves and Asian indentured laborers) and by indigenous groups, has attempted to reduce the culinary diversity within the territory of the nation-state to the taste preferences and values of urban, white, Protestant middle and upper classes. The latter, promoting the scientific nutritional, rational, economic, and moral value of bland diets and the convenience and safety of processed, industrially produced foodstuffs, sought to ‘educate' the immigrant poor arriving from different European and American countries, encouraging them to abandon their ‘traditional' diets in favor of the US diet (see, e.g., Levenstein 1988, 1993; Sack 2000; Shapiro 1986). At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, some intellectuals and politicians within the modernizing Mexican state, similarly motivated by positivist science and economic rationality, sought to promote changes in the diet of Mexican rural peasants and indigenous communities. Accepting