Introduction: Everyday Life

Social Research, Spring, 1999 by Judith Friedlander

   One day I found myself longing for a golden plate of my grandmother's
   fat-laden chicken soup, and I wanted to make that plateful myself. I went
   to my grandmother and asked for her recipe. "How do you make chicken soup,
   grandma?"

      "Voos? asked my grandmother. What?

      "How do you make your great chicken soup?"

      "Nemt a chicken, nemt vasser, nemt zalts ..." You take a chicken, you
   take water, you take salt ...

      "What else?"

      "Zuppengtins ..."

      "Well, okay, how much water?"

      "A tupfull." A potful

      "How much salt?"

      "A bissel." A little.

      "How big a chicken?"

      "A chicken! Du vaist, a chicken." You know, a chicken!

   It was hopeless. Nobody had ever asked my grandmother for a recipe before
   and she hadn't the slightest idea that what she did every Friday night of
   her adult life was a recipe. Who has need for such a thing? Recipes,
   America (Fleischer, 1976, p. 12).

On a more serious note, the ordinary pleasures of preparing food depends primarily on the availability of ingredients. In the Mexican Indian village where I did fieldwork nearly thirty years ago, there were no recipe books either. The basic task was to stretch the chicken or turkey as far as it would go. Served in a thin broth, one chicken easily fed 20 people. As for the vegetables (zuppengrins) they were less varied in Hueyapan than they were in the soup prepared by Lenore Fleisher's grandmother. But everybody agreed about the water. The quantity depended on how many mouths they had to feed (Friedlander, 1975).

I would like to end these brief comments on the ordinary pleasures, rituals, and taboos by returning to the theme with which I began, one that fascinated structural anthropologists. Like Levi-Strauss and Mary Douglas, Edmund Leach also uses food as a way to explore and analyze the organizing principles of cultures. In an article concerned with animal categories and verbal abuse, Leach notes that almost every culture divides people into categories of those one can marry and those one cannot; and animals into categories of those one can eat and those one cannot. After reviewing the ethnographic literature, Leach observes that in virtually every society, humans are classified in the following way:

1. Those who are very close, like parents and siblings, who are not marriageable. Incestuous taboos prevent people in this category from engaging in sexual intercourse with one another.

2. Those who are kin, but not very close (first cousins in English society, clan siblings in many other societies). In general, marriage among members of this category is either prohibited or strongly disapproved.

3. Neighbors (friends), who are not kin and are either potential spouses or enemies.

4. Distant strangers, those who are known to exist, but with whom there is no kind of social relationship possible.

Leach then goes on to describe how many cultures place animals in comparable categories, ranking their edibility. The English, for example, group animals in the following way: