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Rice as Self p.

3-5

Pendahuluan

The subject of food has been widely studied within the fields of anthropology, sociology,
and cultural studies. It It has not, however, been much addressed in communication
studies. When someone thinks of, or mentions food, the first thing that usually comes to
mind is: where does it come from and how does it taste, and what is the story behind it?
Giving the answers to these questions, people usually refer to the cultural context.

Food plays a dynamic role in the way people think of themselves and others. Parry
(1985:613) notes of Hindu culture: “A man is what he eats. Not only is his bodily substance
created out of food, but so is his moral disposition,” and Braudel (1973:66) tells of similar
sayings in Europe. “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are” is similar to the
German proverb, “Der Mensch ist was er isst” (Man is what he eats). Food tells not only how
people live but also how they think of themselves in relation to others. A people’s cuisine, or
a particular food, often marks the boundary between the collective self and the other, for
example, as a basis of discrimination against other peoples. Thus, although the Japanese are
quite attached to raw food, the Ainu take pride in long, thorough cooking methods and
distinguish their “civilized” way from the “barbaric” ways of the Japanese and Gilyaks—their
neighbors—who eat food raw. Many Japanese, in turn, used to or continue to distinguish
themselves from the neighboring Koreans and Chinese by pointing out their use of garlic,
which is not used in washoku (Japanese cuisine). People have a strong attachment to their
own cuisine and, conversely, an aversion to the foodways of others, including their table
manners (Ohnuki-Tierney 1990a).

In many urban areas of the world today, ethnic foods are popular, and food has become truly
internationalized. In the United Kingdom, daily cuisine now includes foods introduced by
people from the former colonies—Africa, the East and West Indies, Pakistan, China (Hong
Kong)— as well as “Italian” pizza and American hamburgers and “American steak.” I saw
with amazement and amusement in south London that “fish and chips” is now sometimes
advertised as “traditional.” In Japan, even before the recent introduction of fast foods from
McDonald’s, A & W, and Kentucky Fried Chicken, a large number of foreign foods had been
adopted, and some had become part of Japanese cuisine, for example, a Chinese noodle dish
(rvmen) and Indian curry.

As cuisines internationalize in many parts of the world, ethnic festivals and foodways
“revive.” These “ethnic revivals” often are “invention[s] of the tradition” (Hobsbawm and
Ranger 1986). Retrospectively constructed practices, including cuisine, are presented as
“genuine, authentic traditions” when they are simply latter-day inventions like the kilt or the
“Highland tradition of Scotland” known today (Trevor-Roper 1983). In contemporary Japan
traditional washoku has made a tremendous comeback precisely because Japan is undergoing
an unprecedented transformation under the impact of global geopolitics. Similarly, “Scottish
Highland culture” was created during the Union with England. In both cases, these
“inventions” relate to the urgent need of peoples to redefine their own identities. The
worldwide phenomenon of “ethnic” or “cultural” revivals, then, must be seen as a
presentation and representation of the self, using foods as “metaphors of self.”

For this process of dialectic differentiation and representations of self and other, people select
not just any food but important foods and cuisine as metaphors. So-called staple foods often
play powerful roles among, for example, the wheat-eating people in north India versus the
rice-eating south Indians; the dark bread of European peasants versus the white bread of the
upper class in past centuries; and rice-eating Asians versus bread-eating Europeans.

To explore how a people use the metaphor of a principal food to think about themselves in
relation to other peoples, I chose, as an example, rice for the Japanese. As a people, the
Japanese have repeatedly reconceptualized themselves as they encountered different others—
Chinese and Westerners—by using rice as a metaphor for themselves. In addition to rice
grains as food, rice paddies have played an enormously important role in the self-identity or
identities of the Japanese. Thus, the symbolism of rice is bifurcated: on the one hand, “rice as
our food” and, on the other hand, “rice paddies as our land,” each reinforcing the other.

As my research on this project began, it became clear that the notion that rice had been “the
staple food”—quantitatively the most important food—of the Japanese since its introduction
to Japan must be questioned in light of postwar research. Although this notion was held to be
an unquestionable historical fact before the war, postwar scholarship began uncovering
evidence that rice has not always been quantitatively important to many Japanese (chap. 3).
Most of these scholars, nonetheless, contend that it has always been of crucial symbolic
significance for them. Of all the meanings assigned to rice, rice as a dominant metaphor of
self has been the most important. In other words, rice has been a dominant metaphor of the
Japanese but not because rice was the food to fill the stomach.

Metaphors used in day-to-day discourse, or “metaphors we live by,” as Lakoff and Johnson
(1980) say, may not always be articulated in the mind of the people. For example, as I explain
later, the metaphor “bread” has layers of meaning, for example, as a metaphor for food in
general and for the body of Christ. But people usually are not articulate about its meanings
and the interrelationships among them.
p.12

Rice, along with wheat and corn, is one of the three most important grains in the world today.
In 1984 wheat occupied 31.8 percent, rice 20.2 percent,and corn17.8
percentofthecultivatedacreageintheworld while wheat constituted 29 percent, rice 26.1
percent, and corn 24.9 percent of all agricultural production (Soda 1989:11). More than one-
third of the world’s population (34.9 percent; 1,166,474,000 people) eat rice as the only
staple food. If one includes those who rely on both rice and other staples, such as corn and
potatoes, the figure increases to 38 percent, and 17.5 percent depend on a combination of
wheat, rice, and other grains. These figures compare with 10.5 percent of the world
population who use wheat as the only staple and 3.0 percent who use both wheat and other
foods, such as corn and potatoes (Watanabe 1987:19).

p.12-13

The major rice-producing countries in 1986 were the People’s Republic of China (36
percent); India (20 percent); Indonesia (8 percent); Bangladesh (5 percent); Thailand (4
percent);Japan (3.1 percent);Burma (2.7 percent) and Korea (1.6 percent). The major non-
Asian rice-producing countries were Brazil (2.1 percent), which has many Japanese and other
Asian residents, and the United States (1.3 percent), but non-Asian production is insignificant
compared to that of Asian countries (Statistics Appendix of NÉrinshÉ White Papers for 1987,
cited in Soda 1989:13). (p. 13)

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