Abstract
‘Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are’—Brillart Savin’s oft-quoted maxim underlines the link between food, the act of consumption and individual identity. Who does one eat with? What does one eat? What are the etiquettes of eating together? How does a cuisine become a symbolic marker of identity? These are the basic questions that link the act of eating to the shaping of cultural boundaries, to the inclusions and exclusions shape the contours of a community. Similarly the questions like where one prefers to eat; who is the host; what is the economy of food exchange and hospitality—underscore the spatialization of foodways in a society. The emergent map of food spaces or the foodscape becomes a reflection on the political and social ideologies of a community. Food ethnography builds on this profoundly communal act of eating together, the everyday time and space where bodily urges overlap with social needs. Eating Together: Food, Space and Identity in Malaysia and Singapore, by Jean Duruz and Gaik Cheng Khoo, places food at centre of the cultural, political and historical narrative of Singapore and Malaysia. The book centres on the food identities forged when different ethnicities encounter each other in public food spaces of the two Southeast Asian neighbours.
Food ethnography is a complex field of borrowing from and contributing to a variety of disciplines like history, society, art and science. This emergent field of scholarship centres on the act of sharing of food or eating together as a form of social contract. Anthropology and culture studies form the thematic core of food ethnography. Discussing the impact of culture on an everyday activity like eating, Clifford Geertz (1973) insists that ‘it is not just to eat; it is to prefer certain foods cooked in certain ways and to follow a rigid table etiquette in consuming them’ (p. 14). Similarly Pierre Bourdieau in his discussion of taste highlights the class distinctions inherent in the eating styles of bourgeoisie and working class as ‘two antagonistic world views …. two representations of human excellence’ (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 199).
Instead of class, it is the ethnic distinctions that hold the centre stage in Eating Together. From the vantage point of contemporary food scene, the book journeys into the realms of history and memory to explore changing ethnic relationships in Malaysia and Singapore. On the way it analyzes the impact of government policies, the shifting economic climate and their impact on food and food sharing. Eschewing the guidebook model, the book is a critique of ‘complex everyday interactions in what are, undeniably, two of the most cosmopolitan and food-savvy nation states of our region’ (p. 2).
The introduction begins with the leitmotif of rojak, a local salad dish made of variety of ingredients. The variations of this iconic dish become a metaphor of the salad bowl multiculturalism particular to the region. The metaphor imparts a sense of heterogeneity and multiculturalism. Rojak becomes a medium to tell stories of migration and exile. From the British colonial administrators to the plantation workers of south India; from the Tamil Muslim and Chinese traders to the movements of the indigenous population—rojak and its ingredient symbolize the profoundly pluralistic society that comes into being when people move away from home and settle on foreign lands.
Rojak is also a metaphor of the tensions that lace inter-ethnic encounters. The authors point out the ethno nationalists’ derogatory reference to the rojak culture in their appeal to preserve cultural purity. Another dimension is added to the premise of the book—‘eating together-in-difference’, which captures these tensions. ‘Together in difference’ underscores the pleasure and uneasiness in our relations with others. Food becomes an ensemble of interactions with difference, a graph of racial politics, religious and ethnic shifts and the solidification of the boundaries between us and them. In other words, food becomes symptomatic of life in the global city.
The sustained analysis of Malaysian and Singaporean foodscape is where Eating Together is strongest. In the seven chapter that follow the theoretical groundwork laid down in the introduction, the book visits everyday food spaces peculiar to the two countries—the kopitiam, the mamak stall, the hawker centre, turns to cosmopolitan and interethnic cuisines and concludes with an analysis of media representations of food and food spaces. It is a wide canvas that captures the national, ethnic and cultural complexity of eating together in Malaysia and Singapore.
In the first chapter, the authors visit traditional Kopitiams (Chinese from coffee shop). The space of a kopitiam is highlighted as ‘a symbol of national identity’, ‘a space where different worlds and cultures meet/collide in hybrid fusion, whether as patrons or in the menu and food served’ (p. 25), ‘a class and ethnic/race leveler’ (p. 31). Duruz and Gaik argue that though the non-halal character and the Chinese operators of a kopitiam signal the ‘Cheesiness’ of this eating space, the menu—from the tarik to the Kaya toast—tells stories of hybridization of Chinese owners and their integration with the colonial Malayan influences. With a mish mash of Malay, Chinese and Western cuisine and its varied clientele, a kopitiam is a democratic space, a fast fading cosmopolitan ideal where interethnic interactions, open discourse and debate hold sway.
Kopitiams are also the representative of local food spaces now grappling with the forces of globalization and change. On one hand is the stiff competition offered by the multinational food chains and on the other, the racial and religion-based policies that have fragmented the contemporary society. In the small scale kopitiam clinging to the older ways, the authors see an embodiment of nostalgia as well as resistance: ‘the small scale kopitiam is also a form of ethnic minority resistance against Malay and Islamic hegemony, against corporate globalization and, finally as assertion of a unique hybrid Chinese Malaysia place and a belonging to the imagined community’ (p. 27).
Apart from traditional kopitiams, the authors visit those that have embraced the forces of globalization, turning from local eateries into boutique chains that fuse the old and the new. The second chapter explores these boutique kopitiams under the oxymoron label ‘nouveau nostalgia’. These globalized versions are symbols of the two nations caught in vortex of developmentalism and memories of the disappearing cultural heritage. Nostalgia is commodified and sold along with the food. The authors visit the Hainanese kopitiams in Singapore. Set up by the migrants from Hainan, the southernmost Chinese province, they recapture the past stories of migrations and weave them with the entrepreneurial culture of Singapore to recreate new and fashionable myths of modernization.
As the kopitiams struggle against the winds of change, Chapter 3 traces the shifts in the national identity in Malaysia as it moves to the mamak stalls that are becoming the new national space; ‘this “national becoming” is interesting for its multiple traces of the “national” is everyday connections of food, space and identity in Malaysia’ (p. 68). Tracing the Tamil root of the word mamak (a reference to maternal uncle), the authors offer an interesting history of migration, racial interactions and intermingling that lies behind the term. Run by Tamil Muslims, migrant tradesmen community from the Indian mainland, mamak stalls have retained their cultural distinctness—right from the food to the cook and the waiters and the ambience. Yellow and green signboards or wall and framed pictures of Quranic verses assert the Muslim identity of this food space.
Yet the Tamil Muslim identity remains an ambiguous hybrid position that troubles those who want to maintain strict boundaries between Muslims, non-Muslims and the homogenized Malay Islamic identity. The discussion centres on the mamak stall as a personal space (an easily accessible and viable option for dining out with family and friends) as well as a potential public sphere where the diversity of style and spectrum of the menu ensures that people from different race and ethnicities intermingle. At the same time, religion and racial schisms offer moments of disquiet. Mamak food emerges as a site of hybridity and ultimately symbolic of the processes of becoming Malaysian.
Chapter 4 presents the next stop on the itinerary is the Hawker Center, another kind of public space for multiethnic eating out experience. Taking the case of Singapore, the authors explore the dilemma the food hawkers once presented in Singapore on the account of being a hygiene menace in a nation absorbed by the idea of development and progress. The ‘centering’ of itinerant hawkers and street food stalls in the 1950s fitted into Singapore’s vision of an orderly and functional city; ‘this history certainly could take shape as a modernist narrative of progress: the state’s cleaning up of the city through movement of population and services from the overcrowded center “into new controlled environments of public housing and satellite towns”’ (p. 103).
Contemporary tourist discourse now markets the Hawker Center food as ‘Singapore soul food’. Leaving aside this collective romance, the authors focus on the Hawker Centers as the site of the ordinary. The emphasis lies on the reconciling the romance and nostalgia with their utilitarian reality—the shed-like structure, drab décor and toss-it-all together menu. The text succeeding in locating the allure of a Hawker Center in the memories of young Singaporeans and their narratives of adolescence and growing up. It is in the memories of childhood, especially in ever-changing landscape of Singapore, that the Hawker Centers acquire the sense of nostalgia. Eating together-in-difference is embodied literally as strangers share the eating space, friendships are forged and food breaches the ethnic and racial barriers. The activity is fraught with tension as food taboos limit the choices of what you eat and with whom. Thus the experience of the Hawker Centre serves as an apprenticeship for the pleasures and dilemmas of cosmopolitan citizenship.
Moving on from the interethnic food spaces, the following two chapters turn to inter-ethnic cuisine of the creolized Peranakan community of Singapore. The community formed by the mingling of the Chinese, Indian and Portuguese immigrants with local Malay populace, the Peranakan cuisine, more popularly known as the Nyonya food, has emerged as a symbol of cross cultural encounters, a marker of plurality and mixed heritage. The discussion surrounding TV series ‘The Little Nyonya’, and its transnational fan base in Chapter 6 serves as an example of the way in which food-based television show fosters global connections as it deliberates on the question of migrant identities.
In its last chapter, Eating Together turns to virtual spaces to further explore the connection between food, tastes and cultural identities. This is hinted earlier in the references to the appropriation of the word kopitiam and mamak stall in the blogging world. Singaporean play Cook a Pot of Curry and Malaysian multicultural film Nasi Lemak 2.0. underline the way food becomes an anchoring point of the narratives that critique political ideologies and tell stories of a multicultural nationhood.
Eating Together is an ethnographic study situated at the confluence of history, politics and economics of contemporary Malaysia and Singapore. Foods and cuisines reemerge constantly with renewed symbolic associations adapting to the changing global and local settings. However, in this account of local food scape, the global is often relegated a homogenizing force threatening the survival of the regional cultures. Is the interaction always antagonistic or are there some interstitial spaces where the local and global interact? Does the global offer an alternative thereby diversifying the foodscape of the two countries? In what ways do the global become a part of a local landscape? These could be the questions worth exploring further.
As a contribution to the field of food ethnography, Eating Together is a timely intervention in the Southeast Asian dining scene where local food culture is struggling to survive in the times of up market coffee shops and multinational food chains. Duruz, an avid researcher in the field of culture studies, food and ethnography and Khoo, with her interests in food, identity and cultural politics of Malaysia tackle broad issues like government policies, racialization and resistance as they analyze the politics of eating together. The canvas is broad and the authors are able to do justice to the discussion. The study is an innovative investigation of food as a window to understanding issues of inclusion, integration and citizenship in changing societies, and therein lies its appeal to a wide range of general readers, food critics and scholars.