Regardless of Differences, there are Commonalities to be Found (POST5)

At the beginning of this project, we were tasked with identifying three cultures and the ways in which they engaged with a specific topic in the cultural lexicon. I made the decision to concentrate on food, believing that one of the cores of any culture is the taking of a meal. In some ways I wasn't far off base. All three of the cultures that I chose had very specific and important ways in which food interacted with, and in many ways constructed the ways the culture exists. That said, it is important to understand that while there are commonalities between the ways in which we organize around food, there are also many differences in our methods of preparing, gathering, using, and even eating the foods that we organize our cultures around.

The Zande and Basarwa especially share some commonalities, being that they hail from the same continent. While the biomes are not necessarily exactly the same, both groups have access to relatively similar surrounding foods, though because the Basarwa do not grow major crops, and the Zande do, the very basis of their diets and ways of life are different. The Zande live primarily off of crops that they grow and process, though many of their foods can be consumed directly with little processing. This is not true of the Basarwa, who must process many of the foods they gather through crushing or cooking as the plants that make up their diet are far more various and tend to require more work to get to the product.

The Kurds are an even more drastic change, not only possessing a different way of producing food, but also a completely different region from the other two. The Kurds food bases require even more preparation and even more intensive work than either of the other groups. Though the food has less overall cultural restrictions than the Basarwa, and growing space than with the Zande, the Kurds base almost all of their food resources around a flock of animals, and must gather any other ingredients while moving from pasture to pasture.

In the end the groups share an importance placed on food sources, but ultimately share very little in terms of actual cultural implications when it comes to the food. This goes a long way toward explaining the importance that we must place on the differences in our cultures. Different people value different things, and have different ways of life. This will affect how they approach all of the aspects of their lives. It is my hope that you, the reader, have gained some understanding of this, and that you have found value in the information provided here. Thank you for following along!

https://www.flickr.com/photos/exchangesphotos/12678004964

 

Works Cited

 Roman Hovsepyan, Nina Stepanyan-Gandilyan, Hamlet Melkumyan, Lili Harutyunyan,
Food as a marker for economy and part of identity: traditional vegetal food of Yezidis and Kurds in Armenia, Journal of Ethnic Foods, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2016, Pages 32-41, ISSN 2352-6181, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jef.2016.01.003. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352618116000044)

 Izady, Mehrdad R. 1992. The Kurds: A Concise Handbook. Washington, D.C.: Crane Russak, Taylor & Francis International Publishers. https://ehrafworldcultures-yale-edu.northernkentuckyuniversity.idm.oclc.org/document?id=ma11-012.

 Evans-Pritchard, E.E. . “A Contribution to the Study of Zande Culture.” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 30 (No. 4)1960: 309–24. doi:https://doi-org.northernkentuckyuniversity.idm.oclc.org/10.2307/1157595.

 Schlippe, Pierre de. 1956. Shifting Cultivation in Africa: The Zande System of Agriculture. London: Routledge &Paul. https://ehrafworldcultures-yale-edu.northernkentuckyuniversity.idm.oclc.org/document?id=fo07-060.

 Gillies, Eva. 1999. “Culture Summary: Azande.” New Haven, Conn.: HRAF. https://ehrafworldcultures-yale-edu.northernkentuckyuniversity.idm.oclc.org/document?id=fo07-000.

 Culwick, Mrs., G. M. 1950. A Dietary Survey among the Zande of the South-Western Sudan. Khartoum: Agricultural Publications Committee, Ministry of Agriculture, Sudan Govt. https://ehrafworldcultures-yale-edu.northernkentuckyuniversity.idm.oclc.org/document?id=fo07-061.

YELLEN, JOHN E. “The Process of Basarwa Assimilation in Botswana.” Botswana Notes and Records 17 (1985): 15–23. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40979731.

 

 Clement Ng’ong’ola. “Land Rights for Marginalized Ethnic Groups in Botswana, with Special Reference to the Basarwa.” Journal of African Law 41, no. 1 (1997): 1–26. http://www.jstor.org/stable/745666.

 

 Lee, Richard B. 1979. The !Kung San: Men, Women, and Work in a Foraging Society. Cambridge, [Eng.]: Cambridge University Press. https://ehrafworldcultures-yale-edu.northernkentuckyuniversity.idm.oclc.org/document?id=fx10-018.

 

 Fourie, Louis. 1928. “The Bushmen of South West Africa.” In The Native Tribes of South West Africa, by Carl Hugo Linsingen Hahn, 79–105. Cape Town: Cape Times limited. https://ehrafworldcultures-yale-edu.northernkentuckyuniversity.idm.oclc.org/document?id=fx10-008.

The San (Basarwa), Life in the Bush of Africa (POST4)

     The San, now designated the Basarwa in their home country of modern day Botswana, are not one tribe but an amalgamation of a few different people. They have been pejoratively called "Bushmen" as they are known to live off of the African "Bush". The Basarwa incorporate the many tribes, including the Zu, Ta'a, and !wi peoples. The common thread that binds these hunter-gatherers is a shared language, the San language, known for its use of clicks. 

    In many ways the Basarwan lifestyle is at odds with that of modern society. Livestock, permanent home structures, and the very concept of owned wealth are foreign ideas to the hunter gatherer, which often leads to conflict between their society, and the society of their more ownership minded brethren. In recent history, attempts have been made to allot land to the Basarwan people, to give them space in our industrialized world to practice their ways of life.

    As mentioned earlier in this blog, The Basarwa are hunter-gatherers. This means that 90% of their sustenance comes from foraged food sources, like wild vegetables, tree nuts, mushrooms, roots, grains, etc. A much smaller portion of their food comes from hunted meat, when it is readily available. The Basarwa will utilize whatever food sources are available to them. For example, a food staple of the !Kung is a hard shelled nut known as the Mongongo. The many foraged foods must often be processed in order to be edible. Of all of the foraged, plant-based foods that the Basarwa make use of, only the berries and gums are eaten without some sort of mashing, mixing, or cooking.For nuts, they are cracked with the aid of hard stones, roots are often boiled or roasted. 

    Meat is a much more specific process among the Basarwa, being significantly rarer in their diet and having many more rules surrounding its processing and utilization. The animal will be skinned, gutted, and cut into pieces. After this process the liver is roasted and eaten by the men who hunted the animal. After cleaning, the stomach is made into a bag to contain the blood of the animal. If the skin is suitable, it will be made into many useful tools, including bowstrings and sandal straps, before they are even finished butchering the animal. The meat is then carried back to the dwelling, called a //gaus, to be divided amongst the band, each piece according to the person who obtains it. Once the meat has been hung in a central place in the //gaus, the chief will arrive to oversee the operations of dividing the meat. He orders a selection of the hunters to open the bones to extract the marrow, placing it in a pot separate from that of the blood near the fire. Some of the meat is roasted at this point. It is worth noting that the man who shot and killed the animal is disallowed from participating in any of this work. As soon as the meat is ready to eat, the chief will remove a piece of the meat from the pot and taste it for himself. This indicates that the meat is now ready for consumption by the tribe.

    The meat is pounded with a stone to tenderize it and placed in a pot along with the blood and the marrow to create a dish known as =koms. All parts of the meat will be consumed, but each portion is ascribed to a specific group of people. For example, the superficial meat of the hindflank, the trotters, and the entrails belong to the wife of the man who killed the animal, but may not be eaten until after the chief has tasted the food.

    It is my hope that my readers have found these facts about the Basarwa interesting and informative. Please leave a comment below, and I'll be happy to answer any questions asked about the subject.

 

https://www.flickr.com/photos/youngrobv/3864577939

Works Cited

YELLEN, JOHN E. “The Process of Basarwa Assimilation in Botswana.” Botswana Notes and Records 17 (1985): 15–23. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40979731.

 

 Clement Ng’ong’ola. “Land Rights for Marginalized Ethnic Groups in Botswana, with Special Reference to the Basarwa.” Journal of African Law 41, no. 1 (1997): 1–26. http://www.jstor.org/stable/745666.

 

 Lee, Richard B. 1979. The !Kung San: Men, Women, and Work in a Foraging Society. Cambridge, [Eng.]: Cambridge University Press. https://ehrafworldcultures-yale-edu.northernkentuckyuniversity.idm.oclc.org/document?id=fx10-018.

 

 Fourie, Louis. 1928. “The Bushmen of South West Africa.” In The Native Tribes of South West Africa, by Carl Hugo Linsingen Hahn, 79–105. Cape Town: Cape Times limited. https://ehrafworldcultures-yale-edu.northernkentuckyuniversity.idm.oclc.org/document?id=fx10-008.

The Kurds: Middle Eastern Pastoralists (POST3)

The Kurdish homeland is spread out over 200,000 miles of territory resembling an inverted V. To the north, their territory pushes into the Caucasus mountains, with expanses reaching out to the Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf. This territory is called Kurdistan, though it is not a formalized state by any means. 

The Kurds themselves utilize their wealth of pastoral lands to care for their herds of sheep, which are their main means of food production. That said wheat and barley have been known to be grown in Kurdistan, and Kurdistan itself is some of the most agriculturally viable land in the middle east. In addition, cash crops like sugar beets and tobacco are also grown in the area, and play an important role in the economy of the Kurdistan territories. 

Traditional dishes of the Kurdish people tend to be lamb or milk based, and may contain other animal products, but will never contain pork. Cultivated herbs and grains are often utilized in their dishes as well, along with local wild plants. Most gathered vegetables are eaten raw, though many are utilized in soups. A sour yoghurt is also produced using milk, which can be utilized in many dishes throughout their cultural cookbook. They are also known to pickle foods and store them, as well as cultivating cheese from their milk stores.

                               https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dovga_e-citizen.JPG

Works Cited:

Izady, Mehrdad R. 1992. The Kurds: A Concise Handbook. Washington, D.C.: Crane Russak, Taylor & Francis International Publishers. https://ehrafworldcultures-yale-edu.northernkentuckyuniversity.idm.oclc.org/document?id=ma11-012.

 Roman Hovsepyan, Nina Stepanyan-Gandilyan, Hamlet Melkumyan, Lili Harutyunyan,
Food as a marker for economy and part of identity: traditional vegetal food of Yezidis and Kurds in Armenia, Journal of Ethnic Foods, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2016, Pages 32-41, ISSN 2352-6181, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jef.2016.01.003. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352618116000044)

The Azande: A Central African Empire (POST2)

In the heart of Africa lies an 800 km span of lands where the Zande dwell. They are the remnants of many cultures, the result of a dynasty of conquests that forged them into a single culture. A single culture which spans three modern day African countries (the Congo, Sudan, and the Central African Republic.) and constitutes nearly a million people. By and large they speak one of two languages either the Zande language, or the lesser spoken Nzakara. The languages are mutually understandable, but differ in the form of nearly 30 percent of their vocabulary.

The Azande people are largely horticulturists, They grow much of their own food on homesteads that span the African Savannah, and in some cases the rainforests of the Congo. Their staple crops are Maize, Cassava, Pumpkin, Sweet Potatoes, Groundnuts, and a variety of oil producing plants. Some of these plants are native to the area, though many have been borrowed from various tribes in the surrounding areas.

 

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cassava_-dried_tuber_pieces_and_ground_flour.jpg

Some foods that the Zande cultivate require more processing than others. Many of the grains utilized by the Zande have to be roasted, ground, shelled and rendered to flour before being used to produce the flours they use to make porridge or, in some cases, beer. Oil seeds must be rendered for their oil through cooking or crushing or a combination of the two to produce the oils the Zande use for cooking. That said some of the foods the Zande consume are as simple as shelling a nut, or in the case of Cowbeans and Sesame seeds, simply eating them raw off of the plant. Cassava has an especially long process, requiring the freshly dug up tuber to be submerged in a river for seven days to ferment before pounding it into a pulp, drying, then grinding it down into flour.

Many of the plants they grow and consume are not necessarily native to the African continent. They have been seen to grow maize and hyptis, which are both plants with origins on the American continents, as well as dtiro, kpagu, and koforo which are also used to produce a variety of oils used in food preparation. Almost all varieties of the Zande are known to grow bananas as well, though they are not thought to be a major source of starches for any of the tribes. Many also grow a type of hibiscus, thought to have originated from the Americas. Most of these foreign foods are said by members of the tribes to have been borrowed from other nearby tribes.

This gives us a great insight to how the Zande accumulate their culture, down even to their foodstuffs from the people around them. The Zande are a melting pot culture, made up of many other cultures and methods, so it only makes sense that even their diet would be a melting pot of foods from all over the world.

Works Cited:

Evans-Pritchard, E.E. . “A Contribution to the Study of Zande Culture.” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 30 (No. 4)1960: 309–24. doi:https://doi-org.northernkentuckyuniversity.idm.oclc.org/10.2307/1157595.

 Schlippe, Pierre de. 1956. Shifting Cultivation in Africa: The Zande System of Agriculture. London: Routledge &Paul. https://ehrafworldcultures-yale-edu.northernkentuckyuniversity.idm.oclc.org/document?id=fo07-060.

 Gillies, Eva. 1999. “Culture Summary: Azande.” New Haven, Conn.: HRAF. https://ehrafworldcultures-yale-edu.northernkentuckyuniversity.idm.oclc.org/document?id=fo07-000.

 Culwick, Mrs., G. M. 1950. A Dietary Survey among the Zande of the South-Western Sudan. Khartoum: Agricultural Publications Committee, Ministry of Agriculture, Sudan Govt. https://ehrafworldcultures-yale-edu.northernkentuckyuniversity.idm.oclc.org/document?id=fo07-061.

Around the Dinner Table ( POST1 )

One of the things that unites every human being, maybe every living being on this planet, is that fact that every single living thing on this planet needs to eat. Food is a central part of every culture, from its selection, to its gathering, to preparation, to how we consume it. Every culture has their own special way of preparing food. I myself am from a northern Appalachian family in which food is a thing that brings people together. We cook massive amounts of food, demand that newcomers get seconds, and send people home with heaping plates so that no one walks away hungry.

To get to the bottom of how a culture handles eating I feel like its best to start at the stage of how that food gets prepared (food preparation (251)) I want to explore how each culture mixes various foodstuffs, decides what parts they want to eat, who does the cooking, whats of each dish go to who. I feel that how we prepare our food is an interesting reflection on who we are as people.

Its also important to examine how a culture plans for future food instability. I want to look into how each culture stores foods for future use, what they keep and what they don't, how does their food source change how they store food. (food storage (252)) I feel there's a big link between a culture's dedication to food storage and how long its view is. 

In the interest of diversifying my sources, I've chosen to focus on three different cultures  from three different methods of food acquisition. I'm interested to see how big of a role the acquisition of food plays in how important preparation and storage are to that culture.

The Cultures I have chosen to explore are: 

The San: The San are are a Hunter-Gatherer culture living largely in Southern Africa. 

 

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gathering_food.jpg

The Kurds: A middle eastern people who are widely spread throughout the region. They they will be our Pastoralists.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/kurdistan4all/5216245408 

The Azande: A central African people who will be serving as our Horticulturists. 

 

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Throwing_knife,_Azande_people,_Honolulu_Museum_of_Art,_5639.1.JPG

 

I hope you will all find this subject as exciting and enlightening as I do!

TEST Post

 This is the first post. I haven't blogged in about five years, so this is more of a 'shaking the dust off' moment for me than an actual first post, but I count this as smashing the proverbial champagne on the boat regardless. I christen this blog, Notions and Insights. 

In the interest of fulfilling requirements:   

    - Favorite Animal: The Red Panda: Its fluffy, adorable, and sleeps for most of its day and I identify with that highly.

    - Favorite Holiday: Halloween: I love dressing up, I love the smell of rotting leaves, I love pumpkins, I love horror movies, and I love the look on my child's face when he gets to scare someone. I love how excited my husband gets as his costume finally comes together after all of his hard work. There's just so much to love about Halloween.