Food Traversing between Binary Oppositions

In “Death, Food, and Fertility (1988), Stuart E. Thompson argues that there is a semiotic significance to the rituals involving food and the types of food that are offered to the dead. More specifically, he argues that food is a medium where by people engage duality. Through the engagement of these dualities, people confirm and challenge existing categories.

One of the main binary oppositions that Thompson writes about is inclusion and exclusion as applied to the living and the dead. More specifically, when a family member dies, the family breaks that member’s rice bowl over a dog’s head to separate the deceased family member from the living; the deceased family member is excluded from the inclusive family meal time where the family members each eat from his or her own bowl (Thompson 1988: 75). Consequently, the physical breaking of the rice bowl reasserts the distinction between the living and the dead. Thompson quotes Girardo, “[food] has the power to unite or to separate” (1988:81). In other words, food exists between duel categories, and the enactment of food rituals, the symbolic meaning behind the food rituals determines which category is being engaged.

In addition to confirming some categories through food rituals, the traditional understanding of some categories is challenged when people act outside of traditional practices associated with food rituals. For example, the black and white, binary understanding of man and woman is contested when a man offers up a pig’s head and tail instead of a woman offering it up at the farewell banquet. The head in this ritual is sometimes call the “daughter’s head” because women are more likely to carry the ritual out, and the responsibility for this particular falls traditionally falls on women, and men even if they do carry out the ritual do not want to report that they carried it out (Thompson 1988: 96). In other words, even though men break categories by offering up the pig’s head and tail, they contend the categories existence. Consequently, the public face of this category remains rigid even though in practice the category’s outline has blurred.

Essentially, food rituals transverses between binary oppositions. Depending on the actual food ritual action, the ritual can either confirm preexisting categories or challenge the identity of the category. Category identify depends upon the actions associated with binary distinction.

Thompson, S. E. 1988. Death, Food, and Fertility. In Death Ritual in Late Imperial and modern China. J. L. Watson and E.S. Rawski, eds. Berkeley: University of California Press.