Discovering Cultures, One Bite at a Time

James L. Watson, Fairbank professor of Chinese society, wants his students in Anthropology 105 to think of the public eating canteens in Maoist China in terms of Harvard dining halls.

"Imagine you're eating at whatever house you're eating at, and the dean or University president comes over the loud speaker, blurting slogans into your ear," he said to the class in a Tuesday morning lecture.

Laced with anecdotes and everyday relevance, Watson's "Food and Culture" course examines the social implications of food around the world, with topics ranging from kosher rules to table manners, from vegetarianism to famine foods.

Having spent most of his life studying China, Watson said he discovered very early that one really cannot understand Chinese culture without understanding food, "and not just the production of food but the consumption, the way people eat, the manners, the etiquette and the symbolism."

So although food has been studied as part of anthropology for many years, in Anthropology 105 it is singled out and placed on the center stage.

"Food is one of those special keys that get people to talk about their lives," Watson says. "If you go up to people and say, tell me about marriage, they probably don't know how to relate to a question like that, but if you say, how many people came to the banquet? They will talk for two hours."

His newest book, Golden Arches East: McDonald's in East Asia, deals with, among other things, the notion of consuming culture: "How non-Americans often view the consumption of Big Macs and french fries as consuming American culture and everything associated with it," as put by Andrea O. Brobeil '98, one of his students and a literature concentrator.

Also of great interest in the course is the discussion of food taboos as culture restrictions, how people draw boundaries around themselves and define themselves by what they eat.

Vegetarianism, according to Watson, is the new hot topic in the course which attracts a deep interest and which seems to be a central feature of the food culture at Harvard.

Students often invite Watson to Faculty evenings in the houses, on which occasions he is "always watching very carefully."

"What's interesting at Harvard is what young men eat versus what young women eat," he says. "The majority of Harvard male students are omnivores, they'd eat anything, while there are many more vegetarians among the young women."

While weight consciousness may be accountable for being a vegetarian, Watson also brings up younger people's attitudes towards the morality of eating other animals.

"If you stop and think about what meat is, in one respect meat is corpse," he says. "If you look at it from that point of view it's very different from looking at it as food. Why do we eat beef but we don't eat cat? Or Americans don't eat dogs."

However, as an anthropologist, Watson can't be too picky.

"My rule is, I eat whatever everybody else eats--this is part of our research methodologies, the way we have to act," he says. "When I do my research I eat whatever is put in front of me. I never question; I never stop; I never blink. My attitude is that this is what my hosts are giving me and I have to respect them, and I've eaten some very strange things."

Among those strange things are finger-sized larvae of giant dragonflies, which are mixed with eggs as omelets in southern China, and Watson says he found it to be nutritious and "very tasty."

"You just have to destroy your own prejudices," he says.

Bound for Paris in the spring, Watson is now learning how to order at meals in French.

"I want to learn as much as I can about Parisian society," he says. "Maybe I'll find some restaurant, maybe butcher shops, or vegetable sellers, or, my favorite, pastry chefs. I'll want to know how they become pastry chefs, what they have to learn, what kind of background they have, if they marry within the category of pastry makers... and I'll start by asking them how to make pastry."

An immensely popular elective for students of various academic backgrounds, "Food and Culture" is perhaps the only anthropology course many of the 106 students in the class would ever take, and for them Watson has a message.

"My agenda is to teach them to be sensitive about the world, to be sensitive about social groups and to attune themselves to focus in on the details of everyday life, in other words, anthropology," he says.

"About everything I talk about in this course is anthropology, but it's done through food," he adds. "You can think of food as lens that focuses your attention on social life, so you can learn about family, kinship, marriage, ethnicity, religion, etc."

According to Watson, this class is continually being expanded and enriched by student input, not only that of his graduate students, but that of undergraduates as well.

"It's just amazing to me how these undergraduates are able to find topics [for research papers] I've never even though of, and then I use them in my next year's teaching," he says. "In fact, my course work now has benefited a great deal from these papers my students have done."

Reciprocally, Watson wins praise from his students for both his lecturing and his student-friendly attitude.

"His lectures are well structured, interesting and easy to follow," Brobeil writes in an e-mail. "And his receptivity to student questions during lectures adds a sense of intimacy in a class which cannot really be considered small."