Food and identity: Reflexive culture s consequences from personal projects to programmatic authenticity

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1 Food and identity: Reflexive culture s consequences from personal projects to programmatic authenticity Søren Askegaard University of Southern Denmark, Odense Opening address, MAPP conference November

2 You eat what you are Pre-reflexive food identity, an example: kallaalimernit a small piece of Greenlander quallunaamernit a small piece of foreigner An immediate relationship between food and identity Endless accounts of us and them identifiers

3 pause er lig med PØLSE!

4 You are what you eat From cultural determinism to becoming who you are Modern self-identities are reflexive (Giddens 1991) The identity of the self, in contrast to the self as a generic phenomenon, presumes reflexive awareness Issues of Body Risk Authenticity Narrative / project

5 Bodily reflexivity I am what I eat! A profoundly instituted relationship between beliefs concerning food and health / food and life quality Competing expert systems Also including food researchers in marketing ;-) Reflexive food: social marking, enmities, scares and fashions Leaving the milky way If it feels good, it must be right mundane brand resistance in the middle classes

6 You are where you eat (Bell & Valentine 1997) Body Healthism (Crawford), genetic disposition, technologies of body Home Home cooked meals, household care, meal practices, Community Dietary fads and fashions, vegetarianism, halal /kosher, City Urban foodscapes, localism (e.g., craft brewing) Region Regional produce, AOC, identity politics,.. Nation National cuisines as a global structure of common difference (Wilk) Global Fair trade, sustainability, global warming,

7 Reflexive culture Culture as a performative act No longer the water fish swim in In search for (authenticated) cultural narratives (mediated through food) to sustain the self-projects Alison James: global and local food discourses and British food identity Learning to be local Marshall Sahlins, Richard Wilk, New Greenlandic Cuisine

8 Global and local identities Without authenticity script With authenticity script Global market Cosmopolitan Expatriate Local market Creolized Nostalgic 8

9 Visitors to Greenland often go for whale-, iceberg- and glacier-watching tours, but active overland travel (beyond dog-sledding) is now becoming more enticing. Working farms sit among the fjords of southern Greenland, where a changing climate and a longer growing season have fueled interest in the new Greenlandic cuisine. Hikers can walk along trails between farms near Qaqortoq and Narsarsuaq for rustic beds and unusual farm-to-table meals like whale skin with angelica herb, garlic and rosemary pickles. (NYT.COM 50 places to go in 2015) Reclaiming Greenland's national identity, insists champion chef Inunnguaq Hegelund, also means reclaiming its national cuisine. ( Fresh from the freezer: gourmet food in Greenland, The Guardian.co.uk, 9/11/2012)

10 A brief history of Greenlandic food identit 1. Pre-colonial Greenlandic fare Hunter-gatherer society + Norse legacy (?) 2. Colonial Greenlandic fare Civilizing process and the KGH (KNI) monopoly 3. Post-colonial Greenlandic fare Fishing vs hunter-gatherer economy 4. New Greenlandic cuisine Programmatic authenticity I.self-other dialectic II.Market dominance and mediation III.Romantization IV.glocal cultural reflexivity

11 Three routes of value circulation

Mediators: market and nature Although I can buy Greenlandic food here at work, like seal, dried fish and mattak and those kinds of things, then I really miss being able to go down to the board and

12 Mediators: market and nature Although I can buy Greenlandic food here at work, like seal, dried fish and mattak and those kinds of things, then I really miss being able to go down to the board and buy fresh goods and then go home and cook it [ ] You know freshly caught fish, cod, red-fish, father-lasher and catfish, and lumpsucker and seal and birds, you know freshly-caught, I really miss that. (fem. migrant, 36) The sourish, half-digested content from the newly cut up reindeer s stomach. It tastes like some kind of fresh salad with yoghurt (fem. migrant, quoted in Nilsson 1982, p 53)

13 Establishing historical roots a guy called Steen has this little hobby farm in the Ameralik Fjord, it s on an old Norse ruin actually. And someone once said to him, you should start cultivating the soil in there and as he turned the soil he could actually smell the manure from their [Norse settlers] household animals because it has just been lying there under the permafrost [ ] and the carrots are growing really close because there is so much nutrition in that soil (chef, male age 40). 13

14 April

15 A contemporary Greenlandic gastron This is an example of last week s menu [ ] scallops with wild mussels with a spinach ravioli [ ] and a soup made of mussels, Steen s potatoes as a puree and the small walnut potatoes smoked, smoked, and fresh chips, butter sauce and smoked Greenlandic lamb [ ] main course, I think was musk ox smoked with paprika [ ] and then a crebinet, like a meatball, reindeer meatball with cheese and an emulation of Labrador tea [ ] and then the sweets we have made a mousse of white chocolate and blueberries and then a crispy shell and a blueberry sorbet and a crème brulée with arctic thyme and a cake based on crowberries [ ] (Chef, male age 40) 15

16 Programmatic authenticity? Programmatic authenticity (Kjeldgaard, Askegaard & Arnould) An emergent cuisine that is interpreted as authentic Not staged authenticity Not creolized culture (e.g. Suasaat, the national soup ) A combination of (cf. Grayson and Martinec 2004) : 1. paradigmatic indexical authenticity Central elements are chosen among classical Greenlandic fare 2. syntagmatic iconic authenticity Elements present in a format that is recognizable and consumable as a contemporary cuisine 16

17 Branded authenticity (Askegaard, Kristensen & Ulver The thing is that I would never consider buying any of these products. If I want something healthy, I rather go directly to the source instead of buying something that has been through so many processes and then mixed into a sort of product

18 GENERIC PRODUCE Contrariety of materiality BRAND Implication of organicity Implication of syntheticity NON- BRAND (CRAFTED PRODUCT) Contrariety of production mode NON-GENERIC PRODUCE (INDUSTRIAL PRODUCT) BRANDED AUTHENTICITY AUTHENTIC BRANDING

19 SOME REFERENCES Søren Askegaard, Dannie Kjeldgaard & Eric J. Arnould (2009), Reflexive Culture s Consequences, in C. Nakata, ed., Beyond Hofstede: Culture Frameworks for Global Marketing and Management, Chicago: Palgrave Macmillan, Dorthe Brogård Kristensen, Heidi Boye & Søren Askegaard Leaving the Milky Way: The Formation of a Consumer Counter Mythology, Journal of Consumer Culture, vol. 11 (2), Sofia Ulver-Sneistrup, Søren Askegaard & Dorthe Brogård Kristensen (2011), The New Work Ethics of Consumption and the Paradox of Mundane Brand Resistance, Journal of Consumer Culture, vol. 11 (2), Dorthe Brogård Kristensen, Søren Askegaard & Lene Hauge Jeppesen (2013), If It Feels Good It Must Be Right : Embodiment Strategies for Healthy Eating and Risk Management, Journal of Consumer Behaviour, vol. 12 (2), Søren Askegaard, Dorthe Brogård Kristensen & Sofia Ulver (2016), Authentic Food and the Double Nature of Branding, in B. Cappellini, L. Parsons & D. Marshall, eds. The Practice of the Meal: Food, Families and the Market Place, London: Routledge Dannie Kjeldgaard, Søren Askegaard & Eric J. Arnould, Programmatic Authenticity: Glocal Market Emergence in Food Culture, revise and resubmit, Journal of Consumer Research & Daniel Bell & Gill Valentine (1997), Consuming Geographies, London: Routledge. Anthony Giddens (1991), Modernity and Self-Identity, Cambridge: Polity Press.

20 Thank you for your attention Questions? 20

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