The American holiday of
Thanksgiving primes the country for an entire season focused on consumerism.
The holiday itself is costly both in time and money invested in shopping for
and preparing the meal. The government supports a conventional food system by
regulating safety requirements that makes the public feel that is safer than
wild game. In America, it is not often that the meal is cooked with ingredients
that have been personally acquired by hunting or gathering. In other nations,
hunting and gathering is not an unusual way of creating a meal for your family.
Cultural differences of food standards can be examined in two ways: through
cultural relativism and ethnocentrism.
Imagine an example
situation of a family that recently immigrated to the United States. Their
culture’s traditional holiday feast is goose, but after not being able to find
it in any markets they lured and butchered a goose in their apartment to
prepare for Thanksgiving. As people of a consumerist society, Americans are
brought up with buying food from a market as the expected norm. The family
engaged in a novel way of obtaining ingredients to a feast that is bound to
have a mixed reaction.
Cultural relativism is
respectful of other cultures because it accepts that there are different values
and standards in different places. According to Lisa Gezon and Conrad Kottak,
cultural relativism is “the viewpoint that behavior in one culture should not be
judged by the standards of another culture” (30). A cultural relativistic point
of view would acknowledge the family’s belief that an unregulated animal would
be safe to eat without imposing rules of one own’s culture upon them. This
perspective would also exclude criticism of the way they butchered the animal
in their apartment.
On the other hand,
ethnocentrism is “the tendency to view one’s own culture as superior and to
apply one’s own cultural values in judging the behavior and beliefs of people
raised in other cultures” (Gezon and Kottak 30). An ethnocentric response
to the family could have been disgust, anger, or imposition of the “correct”
method of preparing a feast. One with an ethnocentric point of view may have
said that they could get sick from eating goose that was unregulated by the FDA
and should have looked for a specialty or exotic meat market. The implied need
for the meat to have been regulated by the government to be safe is imposing a
US belief.
My own reaction, at
first, was ethnocentric. I was taken aback by them eating something that I feed
bread to at a park. Then, I think about my beliefs of the industrialized
production of meats in the US, and I realize the family may actually be eating
meat that is safer than the hormone and antibiotic tainted meats deemed safe by
the FDA. Hunters know how to butcher wild game with skill and in a way that is
safe to eat, and that family may have had that skillset, as well. When I drop
my experience of geese being in parks and accept other’s expectation of eating
geese in feasts, then I am able to have more of a cultural relativist view of
the family's tradition.
Differences in preparing
a meal across borders are unavoidable. How you choose to show your reaction
shows a lot about who you are. Having an adverse reaction to the way that
others do things can be offensive to many people. Being considerate of other's
feelings and accepting values, traditions, and beliefs different than your own
can help broaden your mind. In doing so, you may find other culture's
traditions interesting and worthwhile. There are many benefits to having a
cultural relativist take on situations, especially with technology that enables
us access to people in so many different nations.
Works Cited
Gezon, Lisa, and Conrad Kottak.
ANTH 101: Culture (TMCC Edition). 2nd ed. N.p.:
12 comments:
Interesting blog!
-Cajen
I really liked working on this assignment last semester. It made me closely re-examine the ways I've tried to make sense of other cultures in the past. Even within my background, I sometimes struggle to grasp why certain behaviors or rituals are still practiced, however, I've learned to take a step back and understand these things within context and how they are perceived by people who exercise these practices.
E. Salas
Anth 102/1501
As I recall, your work was that which was featured in this blog entry (or another closely related one). I'm glad that I made such a positive impact on you last semester and that impact continues on to this day.
What people eat is different throughout the world. I would not have been ethnocentric about this situation. It is a bird, people all over the world eat birds. There are television shows that show people eating far worse than a goose. Meat is meat. I think it would be like seeing someone kill a pigeon for food, it is food and maybe that is what someone eats.
I've had pigeon. It's not very good and not worth the time to clean it for the amount of nutritional value you get from what little meat is available to eat.
If your raised eating certain things than they are normal for you.
You should watch "naked and afraid" on the discover channel, they just ate a parrots head that they found on the ground. I wouldn't want to do that, but if hungry enough than I guess anything goes?
I really disagree with America's society eliminating the foraging/ hunting way of getting food. America has developed an industrial food society where people are not too sure where their food came from and it's disturbing. The movie Food Inc. is a fantastic documentary portraying the disgustingness of the food industry. This is why I enjoy hunting. I know where my food has been and generally what it has eaten.
Zachary Forrester
anthro 101 3001 summer
If you are a vegan, eating any creature is wrong.
As you learned with cultural relativism it is not about judging or accepting. It is about respecting others' culture(s). Even if something is wrong to you it may not be to another, and therefore you have to respect everyone's choices as they are their own, not yours.
One of the first things that I learned in Anthropology 101 was the baby in the box. This was where a specific culture was given a box for their newborn baby to grow up in, rather than a bassinet or crib that typical American families use these days. Just as the author above reacted, I did the same: I believed that this practice was absurd, and I just couldn't see how a parent could put their child in a box. Trash belongs in a box, or recyclables but not a baby. After reading the history of the culture and what that culture is used to doing in this situation, I was able to look past my own personal views and adapt to theirs, which I was able to see the gravity of their actions and why. Just as many people would think that American's are insane for dying their hair with bleach, every culture is going to have their own opinions on others. It is up to the specific individual to decide if they are going to view this as a negative connotation, or simply adapt to the culture.
I was unaware that thanksgiving meals in America as well as other countries are cooked with ingredients that have been personally acquired by hunting. I didn't know the importance of hunting until I moved to Missouri.
-apreshana page
I really enjoyed this post because people from other cultures or continents get judged way to quickly and harshly because it is not the "norm" to most US citizens. I am not one to judge, my step mother and her siblings are Mexican and are from Mexico and they cook completely different meal than what I am use to and have their own way of doing things which is perfectly fine to me.
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