Gallo Pinto: Tradition, Memory, and Identity in Costa Rican Foodways

Abstract

This article traces the social history of "gallo pinto" (rice and beans) in Costa Rica in order to unpack the meaning of this innocuous marker of southern Costa Rican identity. Southern Costa Ricans describe pinto as a traditional food, yet they reject its possible origin in Afro-Costa Rican culture. While Costa Ricans’ use of tradition, as word and concept, marks and thereby validates contemporary praxis, the concept simultaneously erases the African cultural heritage of a country that imagines itself as white. This case study demonstrates how multiple lines of evidence (personal interviews, journalistic and academic articles, literature, and institutionally sanctioned histories) can highlight the cleavage between local memory and history, and illuminate larger cultural issues.

Personal networks: a tool for gaining insight into the transmission of knowledge about food and medicinal plants among Tyrolean (Austrian) migrants in Australia, Brazil and Peru

“…Therefore, as stated in previous research [69,72,73] on food knowledge, women play a crucial role in transmitting knowledge. These findings indicate that food knowledge tends to be transferred between individuals of the same sex.…”

Ntsambu, the Foul Smell of Home: Food, Commensality and Identity in the Comoros and in the Diaspora1

“…Food as a category (Rozin 1999), commensality (Miller et al 1988, Tapper andTapper 1986), dietary prescriptions (Douglas 1966, Feely-Harnik 1995 and classification (Levi-Strauss 1970), even cookbooks (Appadurai 1988, Symons 2009, are just some of the themes plucked at random from the anthropology of food (see Mintz andDubois 2002, Holtzman 2006 for reviews). Although food is only one of a plethora of markers of identity, it holds a special place amongst cultural symbols through both its indispensability and its polysensorial character, and the centrality of food to the production of identities is unquestioned (eg, Counihan 1999, Howell 2003, Preston-Werner 2009, Searles 2002. Associations of food, identity and memory often focus on specific forms of cooked foods and meals, and on ways of eating them; a concern with migration (or perhaps more accurately, mobilities), food practices and productions of identity has until recently (see, in addition to this collection, the 2010 special issue of Anthropology of Food 3 ) been either sporadic or peripheral.…”

Conveying Ćeif: Three Croatian Folklore and Folklife Writings on Bosniak Coffee Culture

“…In this context of the academic face of Freud's narcissism of small differences, Croatian folklore accounts of Bosniak coffee culture can not only reveal what coffee meant to nineteenth-century Bosniaks but also what it meant for Croats interested in learning about, as they imagined them, their "brethren" lost to the Muslim faith. Such a critical lens contributes to recent studies of the nexus between foodways and ethnic/racial/national politics [Appadurai 1988;Chen 2011;Ellis 2009;Jones 2017;Pilcher 1998;Preston-Werner 2009;Williment 2001] by providing a vantage into the discursive paradigms that Croatian scholars employed to discuss a population which they endeavored to depict as simultaneously co-nationals and exotic others.…”