The Never-ending Feast

The Anthropology and Archaeology of Feasting

Kaori O'Connor

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781847889270
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Agricultural Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Feast! Throughout human history, and in all parts of the world, feasts have been at the heart of life. The great museums of the world are full of the remains of countless ghostly feasts – dishes that once bore rich meats, pitchers used to pour choice wines, tall jars that held beer sipped through long straws of gold and lapis, immense cauldrons from which hundreds of people could be served. Why were feasts so important, and is there more to feasting than abundance and enjoyment? The Never-Ending Feast is a pioneering work that draws on anthropology, archaeology and history to look at the dynamics of feasting among the great societies of antiquity renowned for their magnificence and might. Reflecting new directions in academic study, the focus shifts beyond the medieval and early modern periods in Western Europe, eastwards to Mesopotamia, Assyria and Achaemenid Persia, early Greece, the Mongol Empire, Shang China and Heian Japan. The past speaks through texts and artefacts. We see how feasts were the primary arena for displays of hierarchy, status and power; a stage upon which loyalties and alliances were negotiated; the occasion for the mobilization and distribution of resources, a means of pleasing the gods, and the place where identities were created, consolidated – and destroyed. The Never-Ending Feast transforms our understanding of feasting past and present, revitalising the fields of anthropology, archaeology, history, museum studies, material culture and food studies, for all of which it is essential reading.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction: Invitation to the Feast

How is it that there is no wreath before the doors, no savour of cooking strikes the tip end of the projecting nose, though the feast of the Amphidromia is on? For then it is the custom to toast slices of cheese from the Chersonese, to boil a cabbage glistening in oil, to broil some fat lamb chops, to pluck the feathers from ringdoves, thrushes and finches withal, at the same time to devour cuttle-fish and squids, to pound with care many wriggling polyps and drink many a cup not too diluted.

(Epippus in Geryones, in Athenaeus IV: 370c–d, in Garnsey 1999: 128)

The tall doors of the British Museum in London, the world’s first and most famous public Temple of the Arts, are flanked by a colonnade of forty-four great stone columns copied from the sanctuaries of the goddess Athena at Priene and the god Dionysius at Teos, topped by a pediment of Grecian figures that symbolize the progress of civilization (Mordaunt Crook 1972). The Museum was built to house treasures that document human cultures from early times to the present and inside, under ceilings so high they are perpetually in soft shadow, rooms open into rooms and grand staircases wind inexorably upwards, leading to things that bespeak the long ago and the faraway. Time gives way to things as some 7,000,000 pieces compete for attention, mounted on plinths or displayed in cases—kraters and kylixes from ancient Greece, silver vessels from Achaemenid Persia, golden bowls from Ur in Mesopotamia, bronze cauldrons from Shang China, lacquer ware from Japan and much more, all with museum labels that call attention to the elegance of their shapes, the sophistication of their colors and the artistry of the designs worked upon their surfaces. The exhibits suggest that here, in all its variety, is Art—the universal essence and epitome of human culture and civilization. But is it?

If you stop thinking of these things as “Art,” what do you see? Although they are now empty, stripped of their function and context, these are dishes that once bore rich foods and splendid roasts, pitchers from which choice wines were poured, tall jars that held beer sipped through long straws set with gold and lapis, platters that were piled high with fruits and sweet cakes, cylinder seals engraved with scenes of banquets, carved friezes showing servants hastening to serve guests, moving so quickly that their clothes flutter behind them. The Museum is full, not of “Art,” but of the remains of countless ghostly feasts.

Feast! Few words are as full of anticipation and excitement, infused with implicit meanings and associations that arise from the common understanding of “feast” defined in the Oxford English Dictionary (2010) as an event of rejoicing and commemoration, held to honor a person or mark a religious or secular anniversary; a festival connected to a place; a sumptuous meal or entertainment given to a number of guests; a banquet especially of a more or less public nature; an unusually abundant and delicious meal. But is this all there is, and was, to feasting?

The collections in the British Museum and establishments like it great and small the world over signify that feasts and feasting are “an extremely significant aspect of social life on a worldwide scale” (Dietler and Hayden 2001b: 2), something that all humans have in common, in all periods of history. Yet despite their ubiquity, the details of feasts past—certainly non-European feasts of the pre-modern period—remain little known outside highly specialized academic fields. Museum curators like to say that “every object tells a story,” but as far as feasts and feasting go, it is more the case that “every object poses questions.” In what social and historical contexts were the feast objects in museums used? What were these feasts of antiquity like, and why were they so important?

Not long ago, these would not have been regarded as serious academic questions. Up until the 1960s, and with the exception of scholars of the Graeco-Roman world (Wilkins 2012; Wilkins, Harvey and Dobson 1995; Halstead and Barrett 2004; Gold and Donahue 2005), along with economic historians and folklorists (Scholliers 2012: 59; Scholliers and Clafin 2012), the lack of interest by historians of antiquity in food, drink and feasts was “attested by their eloquent silence” (Bottéro 2004: 2). There were exceptions, notably Bottéro himself, a French historian and Assyriologist who devoted years to studying the food and drink of ancient Mesopotamia and translated the world’s oldest known recipes, a selection of rich dishes emblematic of palatial cuisine (2004, 2001, 1999, 1995, 1987, 1985). There is also the molecular archaeologist Patrick E. McGovern (2009, 2003; McGovern et al. 1995) who traces the origins and practice of viniculture and brewing and advises breweries and heritage events on recreating the drinks consumed in antiquity, notably reconstructing those served at “King Midas’s Funeral Feast.” Both Bottéro and McGovern placed food and drink in a larger social and historical context, and the fact that their recipes could be reproduced and consumed added another dimension to the field. But on the whole, if mentioned at all, food and feasts were footnotes to history.

Literature was another matter. The Graeco-Roman corpus of works from classical antiquity is full of descriptions like that with which this chapter begins, and this passage from Europe’s oldest cookery book, the Life of Luxury by Archestratus of Gela, fourth century BC, rendered into prose here (Wilkins and Hill 2011) but originally in verse:

Always festoon the head with all kinds of garland at the feast, with whatever the fruitful floor of the earth brings into flower; dress your hair with fine distilled perfumes and all day long throw on the soft ashes myrrh and incense, the fragrant fruits of Syria. And while you are drinking, let these tasty dishes be brought to you: the belly and boiled womb of a sow in cumin and sharp vinegar and silphium; the tender race of roasted birds, and whatever may be in season.

(Archestratus, fragment 62 in Wilkins 2014: 181)

However, this work and countless others were seen as literature, or in some cases as medical texts, not as historical documentation. In literary analyses, food was not sustenance but metaphor, a vehicle for morality and values, and a discourse on its own, distanced from history and from everyday life. Persistent themes were the dangers of pleasure and the disapproval of luxury and excess.

This view entered the Western literary tradition and became an embedded cultural attitude which persists down to the present, its legacy seen in the deep-seated academic fear, still with us, that dwelling upon food and feasting will result in work seen as an “ill-digested fad” (Dietler and Hayden 2001b: 2), superficial and frivolous. Holzman (2006: 164) warned that a popular food-centered analysis would lower the study of taste to merely the study of “tasty things” feeding on Western “Epicurean” sensibilities, while Sutton (2010) cautioned that although the celebration of food is to be lauded, it is vital that the research does not fall prey to “Epicureanism” which he understands to mean the unbridled pursuit of pleasure through all things luxurious, sensual or gluttonous. The Greek philosopher Epicurus (341–270 BC) was actually an advocate of restraint and the simple life, who valued sociability over mere consumption saying: “We should look for someone to eat and drink with before looking for something to eat and drink, for dining alone is leading the life of a lion or wolf.”

However, the misunderstanding and misuse of “Epicureanism” persists. Here can be detected an academic longing for what Sherratt (1999: 13) called “a utopian world without ostentation and cupidity,” along with elements of what Elias (1983) identified as the European bourgeois disapproval of elite splendor and “indulgence” that emerged in the early modern period and for long impeded the study of courtly societies. Under this cloud of disdain and disapproval, it is not surprising that the displays of feasting wares in museums were stripped of context, rendered mute and displayed as “Art.” In sum, “regarded as a trivial or inconsequential activity unrelated to the more serious issues,” feasting was “a critical element almost entirely overlooked in the past” (Hayden and Villeneuve 2011: 435) as a way of understanding human society, until the changes described below.

The Cultural/Material Turn

In the 1970s and 1980s, long-established academic paradigms were subjected to fundamental re-evaluation, transforming the humanities and social sciences (for the initial effects of these movements within anthropology see Ortner 1984 and more broadly Hicks 2010), especially conventional history and literature. The grand narratives and developmental sequences that had characterized the former were discredited, and the prevailing model of official history as “unique and unrepeated sequences of events … an accumulation of discrete actions by individual people” (Elias 1983: 3)—the “great men” approach—was discarded in favor of a search for social patterns and dynamics. The authority of official texts was challenged; they were now seen to be partial, only dealing with elites, and biased, giving only one viewpoint. For historians, “anthropology helped to provide insights into features of the past that were so strange that modern historians had found them difficult to comprehend or examine” (MacFarlane 1988), such as complex rituals, blood-feuds, the Divine Right of Kings, magic and witchcraft; it introduced them to the importance of symbols, the agency of material things, the dynamics of different forms of social organization and the importance of holism. Instead of timeless and objective truths, “tradition” now came to be seen as cultural constructs and interpretations in response to particular times and places, as demonstrated in The Invention of Tradition (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1984), a highly influential work in what came to be called the New History. The former focus on politics, diplomacy and economics was replaced by a wider perspective that took in the whole of cultural and material life, a notable example being the social history, developed by French scholars of the Annales school, which focused on the late medieval and early modern periods. Works that had previously been considered purely “literary” were now seen as social documents, a shift that allowed historians to draw liberally on what James Davidson (1998: xvi) calls “scraps that have fallen from the tables of ancient literature” to illuminate their analysis, using food and drink as lenses through which to see the peoples, events, cultures and environments that produced them. The concept of mentalities emerged—distinctive and persistent worldviews and ways of thought, analogous to what anthropologists call “culture.” Instead of macro-studies on the grand scale, local micro-studies or micro-histories became fashionable, great events were replaced by the ordinary, and the focus turned to the common people, previously invisible in official accounts, often illiterate, cut off from literary high culture and unable to contribute to it.

A pioneering work was Ladurie’s Montaillou (1978), a study of peasants in a medieval village in the Languedoc, France, which drew on Inquisition records that contained the direct testimonies of illiterate peasants, supplemented by the inventories of their material goods as described in the records. The coarse bread, bacon and cabbage soup and provisions like snails gathered from the wild along with the lack of imported goods like sugar and wine, bespoke their lowly position and isolation from networks of trade. As Ladurie demonstrated, to conjure these faceless and voiceless folk from their dark past, new kinds of non-literary “documents” needed to be consulted—administrative records previously considered of little interest, demography and, notably, the non-written record provided by material objects, everything from baskets and furniture to architecture and food. In addition, the symbolic aspects of culture and the cosmologies revealed through ordinary objects and everyday life became important, a key work of the period being The Interpretation of Cultures (Geertz 1973).

Taken together, this was the beginning of what came to be called the Cultural/Material Turn. Non-literate cultures and the everyday material world were new territory for most historians, and many turned to the discipline that had long specialized in them—anthropology.

The Early Anthropology of Food and Feasting

Although some anthropologists would contend that anthropology is older than history (Sahlins 2004), systematic and “scientific” anthropology arose during the era of Western colonization. Detailed descriptions of places and peoples in the new territorial possessions were called for, and in Britain from 1874 onwards many of the necessary observations were carried out with the aid of a remarkable volume called Notes and Queries on Anthropology, the self-stated aim of which was “to promote accurate anthropological observations on the part of travellers” among the indigenous populations that made up the British Empire in its heyday. Small enough to fit into a commodious pocket, it had a ruler in inches and centimetres embossed on the cover, to allow observers to take on-the-spot measurements. The contents consisted of key topics and lists of questions that could be used to construct a detailed description of any society encountered, with the findings to be sent back to the Royal Anthropological Institute in London.

Ultimately becoming a manual for professional anthropologists, Notes and Queries purposely avoided theoretical matters, stating:

These are undoubtedly of great importance, but the immediate duty of an observer is to observe and record, and the mingling of theories with ascertained facts should be rigorously avoided … If the recorder wishes to indulge in hypotheses, these should be relegated to an appendix, so that no ambiguity should arise.

(Notes and Queries 1929: 17)

Instead of theory, Notes and Queries focused on two broad categories—social organization and material culture—not as separate entities, but as parts of an interrelated whole, embracing everything from economics, agriculture and rules of hospitality, to dancing, stimulants and cooking in meticulous detail. Were baskets twined or twilled? How were boats constructed? What kinds of fishhooks were used? In addition, Notes and Queries instructed its readers:

It is important that the study of the artefacts and material culture of a people should not be viewed solely from their material aspects … [there is] an organic connection of ritual practices with the arts and crafts of daily life. Indeed, the practices are considered to be as essential to the industries as are the technical processes themselves, and therefore it is as necessary to record the one as the other. Most, if not all, of the more important ceremonies … socio-religious in character … have also a distinctly practical aim; they serve not only to maintain and increase social well-being, but frequently they have a definite purpose in causing the increase of crops, or success in hunting, fishing and warfare. Therefore, every description of the occupations of a people must take note, not only of their material aspects, but also of the minor ritual acts and the major ceremonies … Further the myths and folk tales connected with any occupation should be recorded … it sometimes happens that particular plants are cultivated with much more ritual than others, some without any at all, and an endeavour should be made to discover which are so treated and why.

(Notes and Queries 1929: 187)

Here, Notes and Queries (1929: 188) pointed out, material culture had an additional use: “There are times when the investigator of socio-religious matters may find that he cannot get information and he will then find that a study of material culture provides him with a convenient avenue of approach.” As material culture threw light on belief, so it revealed social organization. It quickly became apparent that simple questions about material life—such as “Is the food ready cut up or does each help himself?” and “Is there any order observed in serving the persons present or giving drink?” could reveal complex social hierarchies and dynamics of inclusion and exclusion not otherwise easily observable.

The questions in Note...

Table of contents

• FC
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Toc
• Acknowledgments
• List of Illustrations
• 1. Introduction: Invitation to the Feast
• 2. Mesopotamia: The Pursuit of Abundance
• 3. The Assyrians and Achaemenid Persians: Empires of Feasting
• 4. The Greeks: Now Let Us Hasten to the Feast
• 5. Eurasia: The Mongols—An Empire Built on Drinking
• 6. China: The Hidden History of Chinese Feasting
• 7. Japan: Banqueting Beyond a Bridge of Dreams
• 8. Epilogue: After the Feast
• References and Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page