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The Local Mode of Identification, or Who are ‘we’? Who are ‘they’?

 

Much of this could also be included in the ritual mode of identification. Local modes include:

 

Local cultivation of crops;

local ways of cultivating crops;

the cultivation of certain crops, valued and praised by locals;

foraged food, locally collected, acclaimed by locals;

local terms for foods and toponyms;

traditional festivities;

the discourse of food.

 

In the village where I am usually based when conducting my Basque-area research, my landlords (with whom I ate every day) liked to boast of how much we were eating had been produced by their own hand, on their own land. They tended to underline how much better it tasted than much shop-bought produce. My landlord’s father would stress how delicious were the particular strains of fruit or salad vegetable they had chosen to cultivate. They and other villagers underlined how creamy the local milk was and how distinctive its flavour. My landlords, like other locals, would also praise certain foods from certain villages, e.g. the kidney beans of Genevilla, a village twenty kilometres to the west, as being especially good.

They may take patent pride when presenting a certain local product (e.g. the village’s wine, its olive oil), emphasizing how ‘natural’ it is, i.e. how relatively free from chemical additives. One September evening, as the harvested grapes were being ditched into collection vats, one worker siphoned off some fresh grape juice for me. ‘Try that,’ he said, ‘100% pure! And you can’t say that about what’s sold in the shops! Full of chemicals that stuff!’ On Sunday evenings, I usually ate with my landlord who often took delight in showing me how well he knew the countryside by cooking us a meal centred around the undomesticated products he had foraged that afternoon from spots in the surrounding countryside (whose location he would never tell me): wild asparagus, mushrooms, crayfish, etc, washed down with the village wine and ‘mountain tea’ (an infusion made of a local herb I could not identify).

My landlords took pleasure in pointing out to me how even the local terms for a few fruits (such as apricots) were different in their village and those immediately around it from the terms used in the next valley. Several locals were also greatly concerned that all the toponyms within the municipal boundaries be catalogued and so saved for posterity. They were rightly worried that with the rejection of agriculture as an occupation by most of the village youth and the recent concentración parcelaria (reorganization of all the arable land within the municipality into larger fields, which could be more efficiently worked), most toponyms would fall into disuse and be forgotten. To them, these verbal markers of their agricultural space were too valuable a local heritage to be lost so easily. So they raised some of the money to have the task carried out professionally, and did what remained themselves.

Traditional festivities included the weekly dinners of some age-sets within the village. One form of village classification is the division of everyone into age-sets, each covering about a five-year period. If the members of an age-set are active and enthusiastic, they buy a small house or storage building, and convert it into their own premises. Its main purpose is for the holding of dinners every Saturday night and every night during the week-long annual fiestas of the village. A different pair of members prepares the meal each time, and clears up afterwards. If successful, these meals can be lengthy, lively, and loud, with well-charged members singing, debating, and not moving onto the bars of the village until one or two in the morning.



At both meals with my landlords and with the age-set I was attached to, it was important to note: what was being eaten, in what terms was it being assessed, and how was it judged? Information collected in this way may provide insights into the way food is locally valued, while the degree of criticism, its fineness, and how publicly it may be stated are all indicators of how concerned locals are about the quality of what they eat. They are also indicators of to what extent locals recognize a refined palate and the ability to talk about it as a hallmark of savoir-faire, as a necessary skill for those who wish to be regarded as even minimally civilized, or as a sure sign of snobbery. For what a Navarran smallholder might regard as a perfectly reasonable comment on his wife’s cooking and which would be accepted by her as such (e.g. ‘Good but a little overcooked and too much salt. We really shouldn’t buy so much frozen fish; best to keep to fresh when we can afford it.’), his English counterpart might judge as verging on the insulting, and pretentious to boot, while traditionalist members of the English upper-class might view any such concern with the quality of the food and the desire to speak about it at length as an index of poor upbringing: ‘Always vulgar to talk about the food, my dear’.

 


Date: 2015-12-11; view: 969


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