Introduction. Halal Pizza: Food and Culture in a Busy World
Roberta James

1-11

This article introduces a collection of seven papers that offer anthropological examinations of contemporary food-related practices in the Australasian-Pacific region. The collection is based on those presented in the panel ‘Eat me! An anthropological examination of food’ at the Australian Anthropological Society Annual Conference, La Trobe University, Melbourne, 2001. I set out the ethnographic terrain of food in processes of contemporary Australian cultural production, introduce the articles and then briefly discuss the three key themes of the collection. These are the trajectory of grand processes, such as colonialism, in the intimate movements of daily life; the reproduction of social forms via socialities relating to food and commensality; and the (sensory) manifestation and embodiment of epistemes (such as gender) in food- and consumption-related values and practices.

Red Bucket for the Red Cordial, Green Bucket for the Green Cordial: On the Logic and Logistics of Warlpiri Birthday Parties
Yasmine Musharbash

12-22

Birthday parties are a relatively new occurrence at Yuendumu, a Warlpiri settlement in central Australia. By focusing on the food prepared and consumed at these parties, I examine the ritualised Warlpiri and non-Warlpiri elements of these events, with a particular view to Warlpiri women’s creativity in shaping and re-shaping them. I contrast birthday party food from everyday staple foods and so-called ‘bush tucker’, and analyse these different food types in regard to generational differentiation. Lastly, the role of the anthropologist in shaping birthday parties as well as in writing about them is scrutinised.

The Reliable Beauty of Aroma: Staples of Food and Cultural Production among Italian-Australians
Roberta James

23-39

This paper takes an ethnographic journey into Italian-Australian cultural production through an examination of the Italian term for both the flavour and taste of herbs, aroma. Here, I explore the ways in which staple foods and their commensalities engender staple cultural production without necessarily overdetermining the culture produced. Taking the material indeterminacy of culture as a theoretical starting point, I argue that this is the reliable beauty of aroma as well as is its capacity to capture the realities of culture as lived experience. When culture is approached from this direction, stature is returned to ethnographic subjects as people living lives rather than as automatons of cultural form. From this vantage, a theoretical preoccupation with order and structure may be seen to hinder rather than enhance an apprehension of ethnographic fact.

Re-encountering Cuban Tastes in Australia
Euridice T. Charon Cardona

40-53

This paper explores the challenges presented to the everyday praxis of maintaining Cuban identity in the Australian context through an examination of the preparation and eating of Cuban food by migrants in Sydney. I argue that the very different demographic configuration of Cubans in Australia and the US is played out through the different experiences of eating. Cuban identity in the US contrasts markedly with the situation in NSW where the small population of Cubans focus on maintaining a Cuban world in their domestic space through the practice of eating Cuban food, rather than in the public domain. The struggle to find and prepare Cuban food in Australia reflects a distance and separation from homeland both spatially and temporally. The paper suggests that the eating habits of this group constitute a significant ethnic marker used by members of the group to differentiate themselves as Cubans in Australia. Additionally, I argue that the existence of a substantial multicultural and ethnic food market in Australia allows Cuban migrants to acquire the products needed for the Cuban cuisine, from shops primarily serving numerically larger ethnic groups.

Transitions in Taste in Vietnam and the Diaspora
Mandy Thomas

54-67

This paper argues that food and styles of eating have become the predominant markers of social change for the Vietnamese in both Vietnam and in the diaspora. In post-socialist Vietnam the transition to a market economy has allowed for a huge growth in the number of restaurants and cafés, and in the north, a return to an earlier style of cooking. The intense interest and emphasis on food as embodied pleasure has meant that it has come to stand for the transition away from a heavily state-controlled economy. The new configurations of family and friendship are being framed by newly available ways of ‘eating out’, which are both a means of social display and distinction as well as an indicator of the tensions between reform and festivity within an authoritarian nation-state struggling to define itself in a globalising world.
At the same time as food in Vietnam is undergoing rapid transformation so too has the Vietnamese diaspora generationally changed its eating patterns. Although there has been a focus in the literature on food in the diaspora that emphasises the nostalgic and recuperative elements of ‘migrant food’, I argue that food is the prime mechanism of intercultural engagement for each diasporic generation. For older Vietnamese, Vietnamese restaurants and barbecues have been the sites of interplay between cultural ‘tradition’ and innovation, and between Australianness and Vietnameseness, and these interstitial places continue to be important for younger Vietnamese. Within this established framework of cross-cultural interaction, for Vietnamese youth, the social settings of ‘ethnic food’, eaten at home and shared with family, have been grafted onto a sociality of eating fast food. This melding together of both invention and convention, of transgression and ordinariness provides the background against which young people from migrant backgrounds are reinvigorating the social spaces of food consumption and in the process both re-enchanting and destabilising the notion of migrant food.

Love Food: Exchange and Sustenance Among the Cook Island Diaspora
Kalissa Alexeyeff

68-79

This paper analyses the dynamics of food exchange among Cook Islanders. The majority of Cook Islanders live abroad (primarily in New Zealand and Australia), familial and community relationships are maintained by frequent visits to and from the Cook Islands. For many Cook Islanders, the difference between home and abroad is signified through food. Its lack in New Zealand is contrasted with the bounty of home, bounty of food, and the bounty of sustaining caring relationships. As a result, when Cook Islanders from home visit family abroad, they take large quantities of local food with them. This paper explores the affective materiality of food that travels between Cook Islands

Hard Drink and Cigarettes: Restrictive and Expansive Modes of Consumption in an East Malaysian Community
Karen Westmacott

80-95

Based on field research in a Kayan community in Sarawak, East Malaysia, this paper explores new modes of consumption associated with the growth of wage labour in the timber industry. The paper focuses on tobacco and alcohol, and considers the role of consumption, particularly of the products of the global industrial economy, in local efforts toward the creation and recreation of social and cultural identities. Within this, a significant factor is found to be the teachings of the local Protestant evangelical church which are implicated in the choices people make, and attitudes they express, about expanding opportunities for consuming, and consumption of alcohol and tobacco, in particular. It is also suggested that modes of alcohol and tobacco consumption in this community may be usefully seen in terms of a generalised contrast between the restrictive and the expansive

Primitivising Anorexia: The Irresistible Spectacle of Not Eating
Megan Warin

96-106

This article explores the complexities of disseminating ethnographic research within a field that is already saturated by pervasive cultural systems of representation. People with anorexia are inescapably enmeshed in a whole range of fields that define and represent them, including academic writings, psychiatry and popular imaginings. Although these fields are wide (ranging from discursive constructions and to a much lesser extent ethnography), this analysis argues that there is one dominant trope that underpins popular representations of anorexia. It is through the detailed analysis of the public dissemination of this research, of the meeting between ethnography and the print media, that I demonstrate how people with anorexia come to be known through images and words associated with primitivism. Such a reductionist account reproduces the visual spectacle associated with emaciation, and ignores the profound embodied sensations of power and suffering that are central to experiences of anorexia.

Obituary to Bernard S. Cohn, 1928-2003
Soumyen Mukherejee

105-106

Obituary to Budai Tapari, 1954-2003
Garrick Hitchcock

107-108

Bain Attwood and Fiona Magowan (eds) Telling Stories: Indigenous History and Memory in Australia and New Zealand [Michael Jacklin]

109

Piya Chatterjee A Time for Tea: Women, Labor and Post/Colonial Politics on an Indian Plantation [Sheleyah A. Courtney]

110

Jean and John Comaroff (eds) Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism [Rohan Bastin]

112

S. Jaarsma and M. Rohatynskyj (eds) Artefacts: Challenges to a Reflexive Anthropology [Mark Mosko]

115

Gaynor Kavanagh Dream Spaces: Memory and Museum [Jude Philp]

117

Fred R. Myers Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art [Luke Taylor]

118

Nigel A. Stephenson Kastom or Community: A Study of Social Process and Change Among the Wam People, East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea [Michael Goddard]

119

Ida Susser and Thomas C. Patterson (eds) Cultural Diversity in the United States: A Critical Reader [Anthony Marcus]

121

Elizabeth Wood-Ellem Queen Salote of Tonga: The Story of an Era, 1900-1965 [William Newell]

122

Michael W. Young and Julia Clark An Anthropologist in Papua:The Photography of F. E. Williams, 1922-39 [Michael Goddard]

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