Cooking, Care and Domestication: A Culinary Ethnography of the Tai Yong, Northern Thailand (Uppsala Studies in Cultural Anthropology, No 21)

For the Tai Yong -a Tai-speaking group of Shan extraction living in Northern Thailand-to grow and to eat rice is what primarily defines you as a civilized human being. In this book, based on almost two years of anthropological fieldwork, Ing-Britt Trankell takes this definitional statement seriously and lets culinary rules, preferences, and practices constitute the framework for her description and analysis of Yong culture and society. Apart from a comprehensive account of the Yong food system in terms of the symbolic and cosmological significance of various food items, the work provides a solid empirical account of the conditions for agricultural production in a local community in Northern Thailand. It also explores the social implications and concomittants of both mundane and ceremonial food events-everyday meals, feasts, ritual meals, and food offerings, and shows how a localized synthesis of Theravada Buddhism and indigenous spirit cults form a coherent cultural system. Through the culinary perspective, both social and cosmological aspects of kinship and gender re¬lations are highlighted and given an added dimension, and in this way the work is an important contribution to the study of house-based societies in Southeast Asia. The book will appeal to anyone interested in the anthropological study of food and of gender relations, or in the comparative study of Southeast Asian societies.