Publication
Kitchen Anthropology: Understanding Food, Cooking and Eating in Bruneian Middle-Class Families
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Abstract:
Cooking food is a beautiful alchemy and transformation; the consequence of this is where we integrate various influences to create certain meanings. Claude Levi-Stauss said that food can be conceived as a language that expresses social structure and cultural system. Certain food means different things to different communities.
In a time and age where we are infiltrated by commercial interest and encouraged to consume fast food, to cook or not to cook becomes a consequential question. When we do cook, we utilize a space very familiar to us called the kitchen for cultural mixing through hybrid dishes, negotiating gender identities through food preparation and determining kinship ties through sharing of food. What is the meaning of the kitchen for Malays who cook in their homes in Brunei? When we use complex ingredients, do we create a new ethnic culinary culture? What are the social realities such as gender, sex and kinship that will be the outcome when preparing, sharing and distributing food on the dining table?
The consumption of everyday food is one of the most important everyday arenas in which rigid rules about how things should be done are often apparent, although they are often unspoken or only partially explicit. Preparation, sharing and distribution of food are significant and when we prepare cooked food in the Malay kitchen, there are meanings behind it and we instil these meanings in our friends, family and whoever sits down with us at the dining table.
Description:
Date:
2018
Authors:
Faizul H. Ibrahim
Publisher:
Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam
