Page 29 - Studio International - September 1974

FOOD AS AN MT FORM

MARY DOUGLAS

The substance of this paper was delivered as a multitude of others, structuralism is now being
lecture for the Royal Anthropological Institute, considerably widened and refined in order to
London, on 30 May, 1974. take into account more fully the relation between
Introduction art and society. What follows is a mere
One of the differences between anthropology introduction to its hitherto untried possibilities
and sociology is that anthropologists have for the interpretation of food as an art form.
always been particularly interested in what they Imagine a competent young anthropologist
call material culture and in the point at which arriving on this planet from Mars and setting
social interaction makes use of material things. out to study the culture of the English natives.
Thus there has never been a period when He would try to attend all their ceremonies.
anthropologists have not had a currently Sooner or later he would start being invited to
fashionable approach to the materials and art weddings and there he would be perhaps baffled
forms of the civilizations they study. The to make up his mind whether the central focus
present one is structuralism. Having been so of the ceremony was the marriage or the cake.
well established as a form of analysis by
Levi-Strauss and Roland Barthes and a