Blog Post 2: “Culture” as a Keyword

A keyword that continues to crop up in our class readings and especially in Culler is “culture.” This focus on “culture” signifies current literature studies’s self-consciousness in realizing that everything critics assert about a literary work is subjective, determined by the culture in which it was written and then read, and thus not a certain, all-encompassing answer. This point derives from many of the readings we have already discussed in class (Althusser, Culler, Mulvey who dwells on the symbiotic relationship between actor/screen and viewer) and it currently pervades the study of any discipline in which culture has an impact on the resulting creation – math and science are probably free of these effects, but the humanities cannot escape it. I think “culture” as a term deserves scrutiny because it is frequently used throughout serious academic writing and casual conversation, especially on the internet where a statement about culture can reach a substantial portion of the world’s population without any consideration for reliability. In this way, the definition of “culture” becomes muddled and requires distinguishing.

I have selected “culture” as a major keyword for my thesis research on food. In identifying “food culture” as my focus — rather than “food literature,” “food writing,” “food instructions/recipes” — I have pinpointed a preference to focus on the sociological, relationship-oriented dynamics that food engenders in our, or a, culture. I am intrigued by recipes, technique, ingredients, and national dishes, but not just because the process of making food compels me. For the purposes of my thesis, I consider these elements of food important because, for example, a culture’s popular recipes may act as medicine for an illness common to that region; a technique may have become popular because the tools needed were easily accessed or constructed, or because ancient populations perfected the technique and its modern use acts as ancestral remembrance and celebration; ingredients viewed as “indigenous” to a nation or “typical” of its food actually represent living records of colonization or, for instance, famine (in my Writing About Food class we have learned that Columbus brought chilies to India and tomatoes to Italy, which offers a revised perspective on deeming an ingredient “original” to a land). “Food culture,” for me — I haven’t conducted enough research to ensure this meaning is constant throughout academic writing — refers to human interactions with and because of food.

Culler’s statements in Chapter Three identify the dynamic I find so compelling about the interaction between a culture and its food, or food and the culture it spawns. “[C]ultural studies is drawn to the idea of a direct relationship, in which cultural products are the symptom of an underlying socio-political configuration” (Culler 51). More sparsely phrased, the field is about “how cultural productions work and how cultural identities are constructed and organized…” (44). This broad summary of cultural studies helps me understand why the term “food culture” felt relevant and apt for my thesis, even before I had considered what the phrase really meant: it focuses on the “thing’s” (i.e. food, literature, music, films in Mulvey’s case) relationship with its culture, or with cultures it has contact with. Culler employs literature to illustrate cultural studies, and I choose food. My interest in “food culture,” however, seeks not to express cultural studies through the lens of food, but to examine food through the lens of cultural studies. For me, food is not the tool; cultural studies is.