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- Panel 4-3 Making Affinity A Value: Gifts of Rice, Foodstuffs and Food Ways among the Hmub in the Eastern Yun-Gui Plateau /Mei-Ling Chien
Panel 4-3 Making Affinity A Value: Gifts of Rice, Foodstuffs and Food Ways among the Hmub in the Eastern Yun-Gui Plateau /Mei-Ling Chien
Mei-Ling Chien
Professor, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University (NYCU), Taiwan
In Monsoon Asia, sharing a meal that almost always contains rice connotes the presence of kinship relations. Moving beyond works on the sharing of meals, I examine how food-related practices of giving gifts of rice, as well as foodstuffs, animate kinship and gender relations among the Hmub of eastern Guizhou, Southwest China. Cross-cousin marriages, a prescriptive practice among the Hmub, serve as the context for understanding gifts of cooked glutinous rice, wine and meat. The need to present rice gifts to certain relatives (matrilateral parallel kin, but not patrilateral parallel kin), and the need to change the type of rice given (uncooked white rice to cooked glutinous rice, when matrilateral cousins are married into one’s household) accord these relations with a significance that remains invisible in usual anthropological discussions of affine and consanguine relations. For the Hmub, not only do gifts of rice distinguish the multiple kinship relations—new and old, matrilateral and patrilateral—in tacit ways not openly acknowledged through Hmub kinship terminologies, these gifts also smooth the transition from cousin to marriage partner. These transitions are acknowledged through unspoken means, symbolized by giving gifts rather than the outward use of language, and involve re-imagining ones place in different sets of kinship relations that are known but not clearly spelt out. I examine how gifts of rice and foodstuffs provide insights into the Hmub cultural grammar of kinship and gender in ways not afforded by linguistic categories, and into communicative processes that involve the imagining and re-imagining of kin relations and affinity as a value through material culture, ritualized giving and foodways.
Keywords: rice, food cultures, affinity, kinship and gender, Hmub, Yun-Gui Plateau
Professor, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University (NYCU), Taiwan
In Monsoon Asia, sharing a meal that almost always contains rice connotes the presence of kinship relations. Moving beyond works on the sharing of meals, I examine how food-related practices of giving gifts of rice, as well as foodstuffs, animate kinship and gender relations among the Hmub of eastern Guizhou, Southwest China. Cross-cousin marriages, a prescriptive practice among the Hmub, serve as the context for understanding gifts of cooked glutinous rice, wine and meat. The need to present rice gifts to certain relatives (matrilateral parallel kin, but not patrilateral parallel kin), and the need to change the type of rice given (uncooked white rice to cooked glutinous rice, when matrilateral cousins are married into one’s household) accord these relations with a significance that remains invisible in usual anthropological discussions of affine and consanguine relations. For the Hmub, not only do gifts of rice distinguish the multiple kinship relations—new and old, matrilateral and patrilateral—in tacit ways not openly acknowledged through Hmub kinship terminologies, these gifts also smooth the transition from cousin to marriage partner. These transitions are acknowledged through unspoken means, symbolized by giving gifts rather than the outward use of language, and involve re-imagining ones place in different sets of kinship relations that are known but not clearly spelt out. I examine how gifts of rice and foodstuffs provide insights into the Hmub cultural grammar of kinship and gender in ways not afforded by linguistic categories, and into communicative processes that involve the imagining and re-imagining of kin relations and affinity as a value through material culture, ritualized giving and foodways.
Keywords: rice, food cultures, affinity, kinship and gender, Hmub, Yun-Gui Plateau