Journal de la société des américanistes

91-2 | 2005

tome 91, n° 2

Ackee and saltfish vs. amalá con quimbombó? A noteon Sidney Mintz’ contribution to the historicalanthropology of African American cultures

Stephan Palmié

Electronic versionURL: http://journals.openedition.org/jsa/2988DOI: 10.4000/jsa.2988ISSN: 1957-7842

PublisherSociété des américanistes

Printed versionDate of publication: 5 December 2005Number of pages: 89-122ISSN: 0037-9174

Electronic referenceStephan Palmié, « Ackee and saltfish vs. amalá con quimbombó? A note on Sidney Mintz’ contribution tothe historical anthropology of African American cultures », Journal de la société des américanistes[Online], 91-2 | 2005, Online since 10 June 2010, connection on 20 April 2019. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jsa/2988 ; DOI : 10.4000/jsa.2988

© Société des Américanistes

ACKEE AND SALTFISHVS. AMALÂ CON QUIMBOll1BO?

A NOTE ON SIDNEY MJNTZ' CONTRIBUTION

TO THE HISTORICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

OF AFRICAN AMERICAN CULTURES

Stephan PALMI É *

ln the spirit of Sidney Mintz' contribution Io Afri can American historical anthropo-logy, this essay examines thcories all ocating diflèrential explanatory weight to African cultural continuities and New World social conditions in the historical development of A fri can American cultures through the lens of a set of culinary all egories built around two Caribbean dishes. Specifi call y, 1 argue that the opposition recently vo iced by some Afri canist histori ans against the so-called « rapid early synlhesis » mode! developed by Sidney Minl z and Richard Price not just misinterprets the theoretical issues at hand, but foregrounds highly problematic, and ultimately ahistorical, notions of « Afr ica-nity ». Contrasting Cuban and North American conceptual l inkages between « Afr i-canity »and « racial identity », and surveying the emergent North Ameri can lit erature on « culinary Pan-Afri canism »in li ght of theories of cultural property, 1 suggesl thal it is time we transcended the tenns in which the debate between so-called « creoli sts » and «New Revisionists » has been frnmed. [Key words : historical anthropology, Afri can American cultures, food and cuisine, race, Africanity.)

Ackee and saltfi sh 011 a ma là con quimbomb6 ? Note sur la co11trib11tio11 de Sidney 1\fi11tz à /'a11thropo/ogie historique des cultures <1/i'o-a111éricai11es. Cel article s'inscrit dans la li gnée des contributions de Sidney Mintz ù l'anthropologie historique afro-américaine. Par le biais de l'a ualyse d'allégories construites autour de deux plats antill ais, sont analysées diflë rentes théories qui accordent une infl ueuce, plus ou moins importante, aux« continuités culturell es africaines» et a ux conditi ons sociales du Nouveau Monde dans le développement historique des cultures afro-américaines. L'arti cle montre que les prises de positi on de certains afri canistes, all ant à l'encontre du modèle de la «synthèse rapide» développé par Sidney Mintz et Richard Price, se fondent, non seulement sur un malentendu quant aux innovations théoriques proposées par ces deux auteurs, mais aussi sur une conception de l'africanité très problématique et clairement anhistorique. En opposant les liens conceptuels entre « africanité » et « identité

* Departmcnt of Anthropology, U11i1·ersity of Chicago, 1126 E 59th St. , Chicago IL 60637, Éta ts-Unis [palmie@uchicago.edu].

Journal dl' /11 Société des Américanistes, 2005, 91-2, pp. 89-122. © Société des Améric:i nistes.

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raciale» tels qu'il s sont élaborés à Cuba et en Amérique du Nord, et en parcourant, à la lumière des théories sur la propriété culturelle, la litt érature nord-américaine sur le « panafricanisme culinaire», l'auteur propose de dépasser les termes du débat aujourd'hui imposé par les partisans des écoles «créole» et « néo-révisionniste». [Mots clés : anthropologie historique, cultures afro-américaines, nourriture et cuisine, race, « africanité ».]

i Ackee and saltfish o a ma la con quimbomb6 ? U11a nota sobre la co111rib11ciim de Sidney 1\1i11tz a la antropologia liist6rica de las culturas afroa111erica11as. En el espiritu de las contribuciones de Sidney Mint z a la antropologia hist6rica de las culturas afroameri-canas, y mediante el ejemplo de dos alegorias basadas en dos tipicos platos caribeiios, este ensayo contrapone teorias que enfatizan las continuidades culturales africanas contra otras que ponen el peso explicatorio en las condiciones sociales del nuevo mundo. Especificamente plantea que la reciente oposici6n de algunos historiadores africanistas al modelo de una « sintesis ràpida y temprana » desarrollado por Sidney Mintzy Richard Price, no solamente malinterpreta los problemas te6ricos involucrados en este dcbatc, sinoque también se apoya en nocioncs problem{1ticas y ahist6ricas de la « africania ». Luego de contrastar las conexiones conceptuales entre identidad racial y « africania » en Cuba y en América ciel Nork, y a la luz de las teorias sobre la propriedad cultural de revisar la emergente literatura norteamericana sobre el panafri-canismo culinario, este trabajo propone que ya es tiempo de que superemos los términos que han enmarcado el debate entre los llamados crcolistas y los nuevos revisionistas. [Palabras claves : antropologia hist6rica, culturas afroamericanas, antro-pologia culinaria, raza, « africania ».)

Kà si maggi kà si 9br where there is no Maggi, there is no sauce

(Yoruba saying) 1

As Sidney Mintz has taught us, thinking about food can aid us in thinking, through complex histories, widc-rauging processes of cultural change, and the unfolding and transformation of relations of domination and resistance 2• Drin-king heavily sweetened tea came to the emerging British working classas part and parcel of an entire, rapidly evolving package inscribing both the nutritional and cultural terms of their exploitation within the most intimate structures of everyday life (Mintz 1985). Likewise, as Mintz (e.g. 1966; 1970; 1974; 1995 ; 1996b) has pointed out again and again, the human chattel dragged into Ameri-can plantation colonies from Africa assertecl and recovcrcd thcir humanity not just through violent revoit against their oppressors. Less spectacularly, but often far more significantly, thcy did so through sccmingly insignificaut attempts to gain a modicum of control over the conditions of their everyday lives : the ways thcy planted their provision grounds, cooked their food, nourished their children, and buried their dead in allotted garden spaces - thereby lit erally embedcling cvolving systems of kinship and descent in land over which they exercised no formai rights.

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Palmié , ICKHf; AND SALTFISI/ VS. AMAL,/ CON QUl.llROMRO?

ln this cssay, I propose to do something rathcr more modes!, but a lso conceptuall y diffcrent. l wi ll look at two Caribbcan dishcs not so much to illumin ate their historical contexts of origin, as to discuss how we have corne to think about thcsc contexts of origin. The juxtapositi on of the Jamaican ackee and saltfish with the C u ban amala con quimbomb6 in the till e of my contribu-tion, thus, does not so much aim to evoke the <liftèrent histories of local Carib-bean cuisines, the embcddedness of specifi c Caribbean foods in wider Atlantic histories, or their contcmporary meanings to those who consume them - ail fascinating subjects that in both cases await adequate exploration 3. Rather, what I would li ke to do is to construe these two dishes as emblematic of two basic theoretical approaches to the emergence and development of African-American cuit mes : o ne which places prime emphasis on African cultural continuities in the formation of such aggrcgatcs of knowledge and practice, white the other empha-sizes the concrete historical conditions under which heterogeneous cultural forms came to integrate esscntially novel collecti viti es - the slave socictics of the New Wortel. This may seem a somewhat frivolous endeavor - Jess inspired, perhaps, by Sidney Mintz' empirical rigor, and analyt ical sobriety, than by Fernando Ortiz ( 1995) magnificently bookish, and flamboyantly ironical project of casting an essay o n the histo rical impact of tobacco and sugar o n Cu ban society in the fonn of a medieval morality play. Still , since food constitutes a prime symbolic resource for modcling other, non-culinary clomains of cxpcrience and socialit y, I think the many unwitting ironies apparent in the way scholars have intcrpretecl Mintz' path-brcaking theoretical contributions to the histori cal anthropology of African American cultures bcar being scrutinized through a culina ry lcns. After ail , if Plata l ikened analysis to the carving up of a roast, there is no reason why food and cuisine should not serve as a vehicle for theoretical reflcctions.

In teaching the origins and developmcnt of Afr ican American cuit mes, T have often found it uscful to confront students with the few startling facts that we have about the origins of what one might call Jamaica's national breakfast dish - were it not for the fact that the prohibitive pricc of imported sait cod nowadays places the d ish beyond the meaus of ail but the local elite. Of course, when you arc talking about the 18th centmy Briti sh West lndies, sait cod is anyt hing but the luxury food it became in the second ha lf of the 20th century, when internationa l fi shery wars demonstrated that saltcd North At lantic cod was no longer a sheer unlimitcd source of cheap, preservable protcin (Kurlansky 1997). Yet such it was, when Briti sh Caribbcan planters exchanged New England cod against mo lasses in order to feed it to their otherwise protcin-sta rved slaves (Sheridan 1976). Like the Spanish and Portuguese whose Old Wortel knowledgc of sait cod preparations goes back to pre-Columbian limes, the Briti sh knew that sait cod made for an excell ent « fringc » to a « core » of complex carbohydratcs (Mi ntz 1985)- bath nutritionally and in regards to imparting fl avor to otherwise deadly bland starches. They a lso knew that shifting products a round wi thin their

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own imperial circuit made perfect sense in tcrms of mercantili st economic doctrine. How sait cod from Newfoundland and Massachussctts wound up in Caribbean cuisines, in other words, is not a mystery (Innis 1940 ; see also Kurlansky 1997 ; Moreno Fraginals 1986, J 1, p. 60, note 87). Nor, for that mat ter, is there much smprise about the molasses in Boston baked beans, or the popula-rity of the rum distilled from it 4

.

Still , evcn if we wanted to book the ubiquitous cod dishes of the Caribbean as a profit-drivcn transfer of basically European culinary knowledge to cnslaved Africans who might have assimilated sait cod to their own conceptions of fritter-bases, or the use of smoke-dricd fi sh in saucing starches, we would still have to solve the mystcry of the Jamaican use of the reddish, pear-shaped fruit of a tree known as Blig!tia sapida or ackee in cod-fi sh preparations. For not only is the ackee tree of African origin (unlikc the Polynesian breadfruit, which was brought to Jamaica by William Bli gh of Bounty infamy - the botanical name of ackee appears to be based on a misattribution 5). Ackee is also a very ri sky food unless you know when to cal it. Containing a highly toxic peptide, unripe ackee will kil! you if eatcn in suftic ient quantities, and every year a few people in Jamaica die of ackee poisoning. You have to know whcn to pick it - it is ri pe, Jamaicans say, when it begins to smile (i.e. whcn it s skin cracks open exposing the ycllow flesh and black seeds) - and that knowledgc was surely not brought to Jamaica by British planters or Iri sh servants 6.

What we gel when properly soakcd sait cod is gently pan-fried with onions, bell and scotch bonnet peppcrs, and the ripe ycllow pulp of the ackee fruit , in other words, is the paradoxical t ransformation of gcographically extrcmely heterogcneous ingredients and culturally no less disparate forms of culinary knowledge into an enti rely unpreccdented and intenscly locali zed dish. Jt is uot just that people elscwhcrc in the Caribbcan think of ackcc and saltfi sh as something emblematically Jamaicau. lt simply is a dish indigenous Io the place Jamaica became once fully entangled in whal Philip Curtin (1955) called the South Atlantic system 7. Old World materials and forms of knowlcdge certainly arc crucial to its origin. Perhaps Old World taste prefcrcnces may have bcen involved as well, though ackee does not seem Io play much of a role in contem-porary West Afri can diets. But the !tistory of the cultural fonn that is ackcc aud saltfi sh is one of New World trausformation, synthesis and crcati vi ty. lt is, and T hesitate to use the word, a history o f creolization.

My story about ackee and saltfi sh is, of course, an allegorical one. And what it secks to evoke is a way of modeling the origins of African American cultural fonns for which Sidney Mintz and Richard Price's 1976 essay An a11t!tropological approac!t Io the Afro-A111erica11 pas/ : a Caribbea11 per.1pectÎl'e (republished as Tite Birt!t of A.fi'ica11 A111erica11 culture in 1992) is of crucial intellectual importance. Rcacting (among other things) against the highly ahistorical tendencies to dcrive

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Palmié ACIŒf: ANI> SALTF/Sfl VS. A.lfALi CON QU/MlJO.lflJO?

« Africau origins » for New World cultural forms from shortcircuiting tempo-rally disparate ethnographie descriptions from both sides of the Atlantic, Mintz and Price forcefully argued for a rigorous historicization of African-Americanist scholarship. Most crucially, they advocated an aualytical shift away from compa-ring seemingly free-floating units of cultural form to units of historically contex-tualizable social enactment. This immediately problematized the historical condi-tions of social re-aggregation among enslaved Africans in the New World, transforming Atlantic cultural co11tiuuities from an expla11m1s for African Ame-rican cultural forms into the expla11a11du111. For it dirccted attention not only to - processually induced - discontinuities in cultural transmission, but to the role of cultural creativity and large scale ad-hoc syntheses in precipitating the insti-tutional crystallization of such cultural forms as are observable in the Americas. Though careful not to deny the importance of Old World resources in African-American societalization and culture building, Mintz and Price's re-statemcnt of the problem nevertheless placed the explanatory onus squarely on the shoulders of those arguing for immcdiate and ethnically specific African continuities 8. If Herskovits' (1941 ; 1966) pioneering, though methodologically naive, approach to the African-American past had implied an imagery of erosion and fragmen-tation of identifiable transplanted Africa11 units, Mintz and Price emphasized the fusion of fragments into essentially new cultural entities. What came into view, thus, were processes of cultural change, informed both by Old World cultural resources and the exigencies of the particular New World «social arenas » in which they were put to use.

This so-called « rapid early synthcsis »or« creolization » model was taken up primarily by historians of North American slavery, and strongly infiuenccd some of the best social histories of slavery of the l970s and 1980s (from Gutman 1976 through Scott l 985, Kulikoff 1986 and the conference volumes edited by Berlin and Morgan 1991, and McGlynn and Drescher 1992 to mention just a few outstanding examples). But ail the l 980s anthropological rhetoric about practicc, agency, and« historie turns » notwithstanding, Mintz and Price's essay remained largely unread in our own discipline. ln part this may have been due to its relatively obscure initial publication venue. Ilut since historians did manage to get a hold of it , one suspects that one important reason for this curious neglect of Mintz and Prices's contribution Jay in the longstanding marginality of Caribbean ethnography to the thrust of anthropological theorizing. Long regarded as anything but a « prestige zone of theory » (Abu Lughod 1989) for a discipline founded on the naturalistic fiction of the fundamental ab-originality, discrete particularity, and autonomous self-reproduction (and, hence, by implication, essential « 11011-westernness ») of its proper objcct of study, Caribbean and African American societies more generally entered the purview of American anthropology virtually by default - i.e. as a foi! for the study of seemingly « artificially » induced or accelerated forms of cultural change and hybridization

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which, however, remained firml y pegged to implicil notions of previous states of « purity » (Red fi eld et al. 1936 ; Herskovil s 1941 ). Exemplified most clearly in Hcrskovits's programmalic search for African origins of African American cultural « traits», such ana lyses, ironically began to be pcrceived as crudely mechanistic in our discipline precisely at the timc that their political implications became subject of heated public debate in the course of the emergence and radicalization of the Black Movement in the U.S. : as black Americans began to embrace anthropologically pre-constructed versions of an African past (t hat black intellectuals such as W. E. B. DuBois or Carter Woodson hacl long sought to install in the North American public imagination), American anthropologists increasingly distancccl themselves from the methoclologies that had helped to generate, and lencl academic caclié to such constructions 9. lrrespectivc of the methoclological (rather than substantive or epistemological) thrust of Mintz and Price's argument, An a111hropological approac/1 Io the Ajηo-A111erica11 pas/ thus seems to have been perceived as mcrely another contribution to a n increasingly public and thoroughly polit icizecl but, by the same token, theoretically uninteres-ting, and most importantly rathcr passé controversy about whether or to whal extent genuine African continuities in the Americas cou Id be empirically authen-ticated, and whether it was anthropology'sjob to do so (see Scott 1991) JO.

T his, of course, has changecl dramatically in rccent years - a nd on both accounts. Wh il e few anthropologists working in the Caribbean today can be said to be overl y concerned with what Scott ( 1999) call cd a ueo-Herskovitsian « veri-ficationist agenda », the Caribbean it self has suddenly moved into the limeli ght of contemporary theorizing as a site of precisely the kind of historical overdeter-mination, fluidity and instability we now cherish as an antidote to the seemiugly transparent veriti es and purities of yore 11

• Still , the recent infatuation with « things Caribbean » among anthropologists and cultural criti cs self-consciously positi oning themselves on the vanguard of social theory thrives on a host of surprisingly unreftected assumptions. As Kevin Yelvington (2001, p. 250) has argued , the crux of the malter may well be that while American « mainstream » anthropology had once dismissed Caribbean and African American cultures more generall y as inauthentic, burdened wi th a surfeit of turbulent history, spuriously westernizcd and therefore theoreticall y unrewarding (i.e. of interest mainly to those aiming to «do developmeut »), the self-consciously « " new" perspectives in contemporary [i .e. late 20th century] anthropological theory such as the globali zation of cultures, hybridit y, transnationalism, colonialism, and poli tical economy, which have always been the concern of Afro-Americanists, can only be presented as " new" in and through »an eli sion of the precedents set by Caribbean intellcctuals such as Eric William s or C.L.R. James, and anthropologists working on the Caribbean - a region that, after ail , was the craclle of European overseas coloniali sm, a fulcrum for the development of the modern capitalist world system, and the stage for some of the most

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Palmié ACKEE ANIJ S ,ILTFISH VS. AMALJ CON QUJMBO,\ IBO?

dramatic and violent demographic and cultural dislocations in recorded history (see Trouillot 1992).

But how ironie, then, that by the time mainstream anthropology began to discover the Caribbean under the sign of (ail but unproblematic !) theories of « creolization », « globali zation », aud « transnationalism » iu the earl y 1990s, qui te a few historians - happily unfazed by the« cri sis of representati on » raging in their own discipline as well - were turning away from what l would like to call an ackee and saltfish model of the origins and history of Afri can American cultures ! Led by Afr icanists like John Thorn ton (1992) and Paul Lovejoy (1997), but eagerly advocated by some historians of the U.S. South like Gwendolyn Midlo Hall (1992), Douglas Chambers (1997), or Mi chael Gomez (1998), what Lovejoy bill s as a« new revisionism »and describes as an explicitl y « Afri cancen-tric o r even Afroccntric » (Lovejoy 2000, p. 1) approach targets a« crcoli zation school » (allegedly founded by Mintz and Price) for having systematicall y written Africa out of the history of the New World . Lovejoy's confusing terminology to the contrary, this is by no means a critique launched from, or cven originating in, the context of dissident U.S. African American cultural nationali st schola rship (e.g. Asantc 1987; see Moses 1998; Howe 1998; Walkcr 2001). Rather, it emanates from the disciplina ry core of the American historical profession whcre, after decadcs of research focused on the New World social conditions under which African American cultures emerged, neo-Hcrskovitsian notions about the over-riding importance of the slaves' original Afr ican «cultural identity » in such processes have, o nce more, gained grouncl in recent years 12

• Even historians openly skeptical of the « new revisionist » project (such as M organ 1997 or Northup 2000) nowaclays concede that they are facing an emerging « ortho-doxy » which has found institutional expression in such highly visible academic venues as the UNESCO-sponsored Slave Route project, or (although less expli-citl y) in Harvard's W. E. B. DuBois lnstitute's slaving voyage database project (Elti s et al. 1999).

Given the fact that 1 have bcen variously classifi cd by new revisionists as both a member and cri ti c of the« creolization school »(Hall 1997 ; Lovejoy 2000), 1 do not in tend to take the mat ter much beyond noting that one main thrust of the new revisionist critique concerns are-valuation of the role of African ethnicit y in the for mation of New World identities and cultures. Centered as Mintz and Price's essay was on historical and ethnographie cvidence pertaining to the - a rguably rather specifi c - scenario of the cmergence of the socicties and cultures of the Suriname maroons, it is, as David Northup (2000, p. 3 ; Palmié 1993) has argued, perhaps not « surprising that somc scholars have put forward different models of idcntity formation among cnslaved Africans in the Americas » 13

. Dut to proceed to the assertion that the approach advocated by Mintz and Pricc would th ri ve on the « assumption that not much African histo ry is relevant to the study of the Atlantic [world] bccause the enslaved population was too diverse Io sustain the

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continuities of history » (Lovejoy 2000, p. 2) cames down to substituting o ne problematic suppositi on fo r another. For if, as Morgan (1997, p. 123) puis it , the tendency of new revisionists to equate the tenn « natio n » (naci6n, naçào, etc.) as evidenced in the historical record of the slave ! rade with twentieth ccntury conceptions of Afri can ethnolinguistic entities becomes the basis for a rguing that such entities represented « the social force driving the development of slave life » in the New World, the nature of pre-colonia l Afri can forms of collecti ve identi-fi cation would surely constitute the ground on which such a rguments might stand or fall. Yet precisely this is, by no means, an uncontroversial issue among Afri canist historians and historical anthropologists. Many remain highly skepti-cal of the possibilit y of delimitin g stable ethnically organized collectivities in pre-colonial A frica - and they do so bath on empir ical and theoretical grounds, i.e. not because we know that much Afr icanist ethnography misrepresented essentiall y colonial formations as timcless patterns of culture and socialit y, but because we have become wary of the reifi catory and reductionist potentia l of concepts such as « identity », « ethnicit y », and even «culture» 14

• But rather than take on the debate myself, let me resort once more to a culinary allegory.

«;, Has co111ido el mualit? »(« have you eaten ama la? »), my fri end José L uis asked me as I stepped into the sparsely-furni shed apartment in H avana's Vedado secti on of which he had become the proud microbrigadista-owner since I had last bcen to Cuba. « Because that's what la mulata [mcaning his wi fe Carmen] is cooking for you tonight. T he famous ama la con quimbomb6. Just as they make it in the cabiklo 15 her sistcr cooks for in C ienfuegos». What Carmen cooked for me that evening in the fa ll o f 2000 was a thick cornmeal porridge roll ed into dumplings and eaten with a sauce of okra stewed in a fairl y standard Cuban sofrit o of anions, garli c, tomatoes and mild aj i peppers 16

• 1 am quite sure that José Lui s and Carmen trcated me to that dish because José L uis wanted to show me how fa r he had came sincc I fir st met him in the terrible winter of 1994-1995, when hc was sharing two rooms in Centra H abana with three other adults and two childrcn. Aft er ail , as Carmen explained, the secret to good ama la is to add lo ts of fat to the water and cornmeal mix ture - and to this day, neither cooking oi l nor la rd is available for national currency 17

• But José Luis also wanted me to try this d ish because it is stro ngly associatcd with the Afro-Cuban reli gion regla ocha. Amata con quimbomb6 is a sacrifi cial food for Chang6 - the Cuban equiva lent to the deifi cd fourth Al afin of the Oyo Yoruba - and although neither of my fri cnds practice regla ocha, they rightly assumed that I would like to see how this most emblematicall y A fri can of Afro-Cuban foods is made 18

•

Ilut what is a n Afri can or, for that ｭ ｡ ｴｴ ･ Ｑ ｾ＠ Afro-Cuban food ? This is a question which Sidney Mintz raised some 30 years aga in his « Foreword » to Whitten and Szwed's anthology Ｑ ｾｦｲ ｯ Ｍ ａ ＱＱＱ ･ｲ ｩ ｣｡ ＱＱ＠ A11thropo/ogy (Mintz 1970). 1t may, of course, seem commonsensical enough to point to Afri cans eating certain

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foods in Africa - say Fortes and Fortes' (1936), Richards' (1939), Bascom's (1951a and b), Goody's (1982), or Weiss' (1996) descriptions of Tallensi, Bemba, Yoruba, LoDaaga, or Haya cuisine - and propose that what they are eating is « African food». But leaving aside, for the moment, the possible conceptual complication that the Afri can foodways described by these a ut hors ail containcd such New World cultigcns as manioc, maize, or capsicum, the problem immedia-tely becomes clear when we consider what conceptual operations arc necessary to qualify a food eaten in a New World location as« African ».And this-or so my a rgument goes - is a problem relevant not only Io the study of food, but any other cultural forms New World people (or their ethnographers) associate with Africa. In other words : there is not, nor eau there be, anything straightforwardly indexical about attributions of Africanity to phenomena occurring in the Ame-ricas. Nor couic! there be. For different from, say, calling Mount Cameroon an African rock formation, or even attributing African origins to a plant like ackee, it is hard to imagine anything to which the term African-American could be meaningfully appli ed tlwt is 1101 the product of /111111a11 agency and t/ierefore of histo1y .

But let us look at amala con quimbomb6 from a new revisionist perspective nonetheless. Âmàlà is of course, a Yoruba tenn for a yam-flour porridge that might quite conceivably be caten with 9bç ila - i.e. an okra stew perhaps not tao dissimilar from what Carmen cooked for me 19

. Thal the Cu ban version combines American maize with hibiscus esc11/e11tus (which probably came to the Americas from Africa rather than from its probable regions of origina l cultivation in South Asia and the Middle East, and may have spread to Yorubaland through Portu-guese interference) 20 is somewhat troubling from a new revisionist point of view. But it might well be written off a long the same lincs that e.g. John Thornton (1984 ; 1988; 2002) has used to interpret some of the Catholi c elements in Haiti an vodou as Africanisms - i.e. as all ogenic imports (whether biotic or cultural) which had taken root in certain regions of Afri ca so early, that they can effectively be treated as African imports to the Americas 2 1

. Thal Bascom's informan ts in Il e Ifé in the l 930s had came to assimil ate cassava porridge to the term àmàlà would only strengthen such a case - as would the Afro-Cuban myth coll ected by Cabrera (1983, p. 468) that dcpicts Chang6 himself as the bringer of maize to Yorubaland 22

.

Thal question bracketed, however, it is ironically the dish's patently Afr ican name which - perhaps more than anything else - spoil s the broth for those intent on concocting a new revisionist case, clcarl y ma rking amala con quimbomb6 off, instead, as historically « of » the New World. To be sure, amalâ is a Yoruba word fo r a conceptuall y simil ar dish which enslaved Yoruba-speakers may well have brought to Cuba. Yet the Bantu-derived term quimbomb6 23 points towards a potentially much longer history of Western Central Afri can-inspired okra-use in Cuba. For, while Cuba received slaves from western Central Afr ica as early as the

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l 6th century, it was only when Cuba's extremely laie development as a sugar colony coincided with the wars unlcashed by the increasing decline of the Oyo Yoruba state after about 1820 that large numbers of Yoruba-speaking slaves entered the island 24

• This is not Io say that a Yoruba deity learned to eat his starches with a western Central African sauce that may have bcen locally known as « mwamba » or « moamba » when his enslaved worshippers arrived in Cuba 25

. What l do want Io point out, however, is that the conjunction of the tenus amala and quimbomb6 make it hard to think of the dish, its name, and even the sacred uses it is putto in contemporary regla ocha as anything other than historical composites - and ones for which the New World provides a far more plausible scenario of origin than any single region of Africa. For consider this : where in Africa might someone eating okra stew with cornmeal porridge say that he or she was eating amala and quimbomb6, associate a food of that name with a deity locally known as Chang6, and regard il as emblematically « African » (rather than simply a part of local or regional cuisine)?

But there is more to the malter. For while both of my Cuban hosts that evening in cl Vedado certainly were of African descent, I am positive that neither of them would have laid a greater claim on amala con quimbomb6 than pheno-typically white Cu bans initiated into the cuit of the Chang6. This brings us to the question about the social identity of consumer and consumed that Sidney Mintz broached more than thirty years ago (Mintz 1970). Obviously, the issue deserves fuller attention than 1 can give it here. But 1 would like to indicate how complex the mat ter is in the Cu ban case, and then present, if in mere outline, some of the more perplexing results of the current North American trend towards the objec-tification of culinary knowledge and practice as racialized forms of collectivcly « owned » immaterial property. What 1 hope to illumina te is not just the plasticity of the culinary signifier, but its necessary embeddedness in historically spccific local cconomies of identity management that include, and perhaps inevitably so, narrative projections about geohistorical « origins » that may - but need not -correlate with constructions of racial identities.

Nowhere, perhaps, is this more evident than in the case of Cuba's patently and undisputedly African derived religious traditions : both oral tradition and documentary evidence clearly indicate that by 1857, Havana had become the scene of the inauguration of the first chapter of a southeastern Nigerian type of secret society entirely composed of socially white men (Palmié 2006). What is more, Jess than a generation after five Yoruba-speaking Africans, in the 1890s, finally fixed the initiatory mechanisms by which the Ifa-oracle would henceforth be reproduced in the New World, the first white priests of Ha bccame active in western Cuba (Brown 2003). By the l 920s, the !fa-oracle - just like the cuit of Chang6 - had become indigenous to Cuba. But they had clone so by transcending some of Cuba's most solidly entrenched social barriers. That dishes with patently

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African-derived names such as« fufù » (mashed plantains, i\tfusa paradisiaca or ilame, Dioscorea a/ata) are nowadays not only 110 1 regarded as emblematically « black » but, on the contrary, perceivcd as part of the « vianda » complex (a starchy « corc » of usually native tubers or plantains that must accompany the similarly inevitable rice and beans) which, icleally, fonn parts of any tnt!y Cu ban meal 26

, is only a Jess spectacular instance of this particularly Cuban logic of « transracial Africanity » that Fernando Ortiz (1940), by the late 1930s, began to subsume under the label « Africania ». What he meant was a fonn of identifica-tion crucial to the icleology of « hybrid » New World nationhood that he was trying to elaborate at the lime : opposed to the mcre fact of being and remaining « Afri can »,but instead constituting a moment within an historical dialectic that woulcl evcntually transform mere « Cubanidacl » into conscious « Cubania », « Africanîa » rcpresents a delibcrate identification with African-dcrived cultural forms by Cubans of whatever clesccnt or phenotype. lt is thus (as Comanclante Castro, for reasons of his own, has grown increasingly fond of emphasizing over the years) essentially and necessarily a part of an idcology of national becoming that must transcend race (see Palmié 1998)- and is therefore capable of tolerating ail kinds of assertions of « Africanity » in the public sphere, while severely restricting any fonn of« racial» identity politics 27

•

And in that scnse, therc is yet another set of New World histories crucial to the making of the amala con quimbomb6 Carmen cooked for me in Septembcr 2000. 1 have never becn to the house of the cuit group in Cienfuegos where Cannen's sister's culinary regime holds sway. But it is not al ail counterintuitive to think of the hybrid culinary knowledge underlying this dish as having been trausmittcd to our days by a succession of priests and cooks not just of African, but European, and qui te possibly also Asian descent - or, indeed, various combinations thcreo( This is not so bccause Cuban constructions of race « somehow » allow for degrces of disarticulation between notions of « blackness » and « Africanity » that North Americans find hard to translate into the terms of an ideology of the discrete distribution of racially marked cultural forms among the members of mutually exclusive socia l groups defined in accordance with seemingly rigid, but in fact historically highly variable notions of African or European descent 28

.

They do, and precisely because - for historical reasons - Cu bans came to elabo-rate patterns of social exclusion based in an ideology of all- embracing nation-hood, that allows for what Roger Lancaster (1992) calls a characteristically Latin-American fonn of« racism in the absence of corporate races» (sce Pahnié 2002). Nevertheless, neither North American types of white racist mobilization and black cultural nationali sm, nor Latin American-style « ail inclusive ideolo-gies of exclusion » (Stutzman 1981 ; see Martinez Echazabal 1998) are anything but local cultural formations elaborated from - and only seemingly riding above - the historical divergent ways in which projections of« racially » concei-ved modes of social identification have been harnessed to political agendas that

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are well servcd by a confiation of nature and culture (Wade 1993). For ail representations of the relations bctween specifi c cultural forms and the social identities o f those who avail themselves of such forms are, of course, themselves cultural constructions - products, in this case, of locally specifi c, and differenti-ally politicized, forms of the genealogical and historical imagination.

The knowledge required to make proper amala, recite the verses associated with a particular sigu of the ifa-oracle, open up a bank account, or maintain a specific racial identity is, after ail , not innate, but socially acquircd. And there is nothing particularl y mysteri ous or intriguiug about that fact - al least in princi-ple. I , myself, fir st heard the myth of how Chang6's fir st wi fe Oba once cooked up one of her ears to make 9bç for his amala (Bascom 1992) from the sociall y white wife of a sociall y no less white pricst of Chang6 : Ernesto Pichardo - the man who in 1993 won a U.S. Supreme Court case legalizing anima l sacrifi ce for his properly incorporated Church of the Lukumi Babalu Ayé whose beliefs and practiccs Pichardo consistcntly qualified as African 29

• Thal any of this should strike some observcrs as surprisiug surely says more about their own culture, and its thorough naturali zation of an imputed linkage between ancestry, physique, and cultural repertoire, than about the symbolic uuiverses people like Pichardo, or, for that malter, my fri ends José Luis and Carmen in habit 30

•

And here we come to a final issue Sidney Mintz has consistently reminded us of for the past half century : ncither « race » 11or « origins » are auything but sociall y and historicall y contingent constructi ons. As both the black writer and activi st Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka 1966), and the founder of the Nation of Islam, the honorable Elijah Muhammad (1967) clcarly recognized in their own very different ways, eating corn bread, coll ard greens, ham hocks, or chitterlings, by itself, does not constitutc an assertion or rej ection of certain identities, subject positions, o r visions o f coll ecti ve history. What does, is the symboli c act of situating these same foods within narrati ves about their signifi cance for patterns of commensal affinit y among the oppressed and exclucled (as in the case of Joues/Baraka), or about racist conspiracies to clestroy the health, vigor, and self- esteem of the members of the lost-founcl Nation of Islam in the wilderncss of North America, in Elijah Muhammacl 's case. In both instances, the call for sumptuary refonn encapsulates prescriptions for historical agency (Coma-roff 1985) - cnvisioned to result in a return to a cuisine rooted in, and authen-ticated through, the sha red historical experience of slavery, as Jones/Baraka argued, and, in the case of the Nation of Islam, in a rejection o f precisely that culinary tradition as part and pa rce! of the « white tricknology » by means of which the continuation of an unwitting complicity of the« so-call ed Negro » in his own oppression is ensured. Or consider the biting sarcasm with which co-founder of the Bl ack Panther Party Eldridge Cleaver (who neither hcld sympathies for the Nation o f Tslam's nor Jones/Baraka's positi on), al about the same time, castigated the late l 960s Afri can American « emphasis on

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Soul Food » as a « counter-revolutionary black bourgeois ideology » : « You hear a lot of Jazz about Soul Food » he wrote in 1968 (Cleaver 1992, p. 40. Emphasis in the original) :

Take chitterlings : the ghetto blacks eat them from necessit y while the black bourgeoisie has turned it into a mocking slogan. Eating chitterlings is like going slumming to them. Now that they have the price of a steak, here they come prattling about Soul Food . The people in the ghetto wanl steaks. Beef Steaks.! wish 1 had the power to see toit that the bourgeoisie really did have to make it on Soul Food. 3 1

To paraphrase Marx, for Cleaver, the black revolution cou Id draw neither its poetry, no r il s cuisine from a pasl of slavery and oppressio n, nor could it withdraw into an imaginary culinary community based on invented countercul-tural traditions. The emphasis here must be on « tradition» rather than « inven-tion » - for it is surely no accident that Ron Maulana Karenga hatched his ideas about Kwaanza at the time of bis break with the Black Panther Party. Officially sanctioned by President Clinton in 1996, the festive meals of Kwaanza and its associated African American heritage industry are now, of course, part and parcel of a booming U.S. market in what one might call « diversity goods » (Hernàndez-Reguant 1999 ; Dominguez 1994). Yet how even more striking theu that food would have served as a common idiom - and by no means an unimpor-tant one - in, and through, which self-consciously black oppositional subjectivi-ties and ways of belonging were delineated and fought over in those heady days when the U.S. Civil Rights legislation had barely been accompli shed !

Make no mistake here : «validations or denials [of such discourses on iden-tity or historical subjectivity] through the employment of cultural forms depend upon the symbolic associations - the meaning or siguifi cance - of each usage to those who hold positio ns within a given social system or sub-system » (Mintz 1970, p. 10), not on the real or putative origins, in time and space, of the forms in question. For just as ingesting blanquette de veau or coq au vin does not, by itself, turn people into Frenchmen, eating amalà, ackee and saltfi sh, mwamba, collard greens, or bean cakes after ail, have yet to make a Yoruba, Jamaican, western Central African Bantu-speaker, U.S. African American, or Black Muslim out of anyone on such ground a tone. lu fact, terms such as« origins »or« identities » a re largely meaningless unless they are properly contextualized in historical patterns of interested local deployment - even, and perhaps especially - if such forms bccome locally available, or at least endowed with accentuated significance for the imagining of culinarily bounded communities, through mass-mediated, and nowadays prineipally global networks of distribution (sueh as e.g. the internet).

This holds true in particular for the« Afrocentric » gastrographical revisio-nism currently underway in the post-affirmative action United States. There the

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pursuit of culinary « roots » has lately become part of a larger herit age industry catering to consumers economicall y capacitated to engage in a nutritional iden-tity politics of culi nary self-authentication. Following Appadurai (1988), Hernândez-Reguant ( 1999) thus argues that the« rise and increased visibi lit y of a black middle class as a result of the Civi l Rights movement and affirmative action policies, as well as the multicultural movement of the late 1980s onward have produced the creation of a spccific Afr ican-American cuisine». One could debate, of course, whether the culinary practices in question were « created » or rather belatedly objectified as a c11/i11my and co11s11111ptfre regi111e11 in the slew of cookbooks and articles devoted to soul food, Kwaanza meals, or culinary Pan-Africanism appearing in food and li fcstyle magazines since the 1980s 32

. Yet it is clear that the prolifcration of such culinary discourses is not just symptomatic of the integration of cultural forms marked as« black» into a multicultural spec-trum of readily commodif y able for ms of« difference ».This trend also bespeaks the transformation of prior modes of racializati on in the U.S. public sphere - to the extent that the conspicuous display of cultural practices marked as « Afri-can » (or« born from slavery », for that malter) is not only no longer a sign of abjection, but, on the contrary, has become the prerogative of those consumers whose social « blackness » no longer excludes them from aspirations to full market-participation, and so from what some political theorists nowadays call «cultural citizenship » in a self-consciously multicultural nation savoring « d iversity »in properly packaged fonn.

Yet what does it mean to « have» a cuisine of one's own (or, for that matte1; a «culture», « history », or even « identity »)? And why - Io extcnd a question Mintz (1996b) posed à propos the issue of whethcr «national cuisines» could be said Io exist - would any of this nccessarily be a good thing ? As Simon Harrison (l 992 ; 1993 ; 1999) has argued , the objecti fication - and monopolistic patrimo-nialization - of intangible cultural forms (such as the knowledge necessary to perform a divination rite or cook a certain dish) is not just characteristi c of post-enlightenment western cultures where Herderian (and similar romantic) notions of deeply rooted national particularity and « genius » were Io play a momentous political role after the shocking denouement of the universali sms of the French Revolution. We do, of course, fi nd such political instrumentalizations of notions of «cultural property » ail over Melanesia, parts of Native North America, or early colonia l Africa whcre a regular commerce in recipes - and I am using that term adviscdly - for cui t agencies, objects, and ritual had rnost li kcly long antedated the effecti ve colonial moment. Nevertheless, as Richard Handler (1988) was probably fir st Io point out, the regulated exchange of« irnmaterial possessions» that such scenarios illustra te, was significantly enhanced, and often re-directed, by ideas of« culture»,« tradition»,« herit age »(or what have you) as goods potentially analogous to western notions of individually or coll ectively held property that restrict or exclude the consumption, enjoyrnent or usufruct by

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others on the basis of essentially Lockean theories of property-creation or Hegelian notions of sclf-realization in a world of abjects. Rightful ownersbip, in that sense, resides wi th whoever has decided to extricate things from a state of nature, mixed her (or in this case better : their coll ective) ingenuity with it , and thereby performed an act of -potentially repeatable - production of what Bour-dieu (1984) would cal! cultural capital circulating in a social fi eld conceived of as a market in which actors and groups compete for scarce resources consisting in symbolic markers of distinction.

Again, we might debate the origins and intell ectual history of such concep-tions. But it should be clear that on a basic level the daims Carmen might have laid on her amala that evening in el Vedado qua her undisputed African ancestry cou Id - just cou Id ! - be very different from the ones 1 might launch if I cooked and served that same dish to my wife or fri ends in Chicago (say, for example, to authenticate my fieldwork experience). But given that rccipes - like many other models « of and for » behavior - are, in principle, easily reproducible across ail kinds of cultural and social boundaries, would Carmen think that 1 pirated signifi cant aspects of her historical, cultural, or racial identity or, alternativcly, served culturall y inauthentic food (as a German cooking Cuban food for what likely would be Americans) ? l think not. Dut my case rests lar-gely on an instance of friendship, and my limitcd understanding of the - considerable - differcnces between Cuba and the U.S. in regards to social investments in the symbolic power of culinary «abjects» (i ncluding both foods and their recipes) to likewise objectify, render palpable (or palatable, if you will ), and potentially appropriable, notionall y signifi cant aspects of the collective identitics of their original creators and « rightful » consumers. For what is stri king in the North American case is that a historicall y specific, and nowadays evidently market-driven, conjunction betwcen notions of « cultu-ral origins » and corporative understandings of « racia l » coll ectivities has pro-duced an idcology suggesting that such groups not only « possess » clearly delimitable «cultures» or « herit ages », but that they ought to maintain « an exclusive association with distinctive sets of symbolic practices ( ... ] and prevent those defined as outsiders from reproducing these markers of identity » (Harri-son 1999, p. 243).

Let me not equivocate here : Cubans do draw boundaries around what they cal! « comida criolla » (and basicall y understand as local homestyle cooking) in juxtaposing such a« national » (or even patriotic- see Dawdy 2002) - cuisine to unmitigatedly foreign foods 33

. But they seem rather unconcerned about its reproduction by non-nationals, and certainly do not routinely invcst il with racial meanings. In contrast, a peculiarly North American ideology concerning aspira-tions to recognition and meritocratic rewarcls regarded as principally achievable by ail members of mutually exclusive, notionally descent-based groups that supposcdly possess clearly bounded cultures has lcd to a culinary identity poli tics

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where multicultural cqua l opportunity cooking and eating makes it necessary to regard one's group's culinary knowledge and practices as a heritable, but ultima-tcly scarce, resource 34

• In the case of recent African American culinary writing, this means that guarding such knowledge against de-authentication, « identity theft », or « culinary colonialism » becomes crucial to maintaining a sense of authentically « black »collective sel010od grounded in the uniquely North Ame-rican alignment of notions of African cultural origins with ideas about biological « race» that has, in recent years, increasingly begun to take on« Atlantic» if not global dimensions. For while non-black « racial others » might be granted the right to enjoy, but never regard as « theirs », a cuisine notionally traced to a continental African homeland, the same logic allows for the symboli c repatria-tion of dishes of oftcntimes extremely heterogeneous provenience, but associated with people who 111011/d be regarded as black in the U. S., in an« originary » matrix of largely North American ideological origin 35

. The paradoxical outgrowth of this is a kind of culinary « poetics of relation» (Glissant 1997) that allows the U.S. African American culinary nationalist to - as Grosvenor ( 1999, p. x) puts it in an apt turn of phrase - « travel » the « Afro-Atlantic foodways » in search of what, with apologies to Gi lroy ( 1993), one might call a« countercuisine » unified around a conception of blackness increasingly imagined as bath biologically based and geo-historially determined.

At this point, however, the very contras! between what I have callcd an« ackee and saltfish » and an « amala con quimbomb6 » mode! of African American cultural history not only dissolves in the face of a totalizing narrative capable of horizontally assimilating Cuban amalâ to Barbadian coo coo, Southern corn-bread, or even polenta, whilc vertically tracing ail of thcm to an essentially African system of roots. Their status as modcling devices itself must now become abject of analytical scrutiny. Whatever their specific usefulncss in interpreting or deliberating concrete historical or ethnographie data may be, their epistcmologi-cal status is that of models of a historical reality to which we have, to put it optimistically, only mediate access. What is more, such models-as public discur-sive productions - arc obviously not politically innocent, or epistemologically transparent. lnstead, they too are subject to, and expressions of, the kinds of processes White {1973) described as the (perhaps incvitable) narrative moraliza-tion of the past in its relation to the present in which «modern » historical forms of knowledge production are arguably rootcd, and which, to paraphrase Hobs-bawm (1971) endows such models (or better perhaps : the staries spun from them) with social and political functions. Thus wc arrive al a point where- and certainly not without regrets - it has become time for me to take leave of my own analytical contrivance, and abandon both ackec and saltfish and amalâ con quimbomb6 as bettcr (or worse) metaphorical devices to capture an« objective» past. That this is so owes to the fact that they nevcr were « just » abstract modcling devices, but

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necessarily (if - perhaps ! - unwittingly) political interventions as well : plotting devices for rooting the present in a past plausible not just 011 an analytical level, but a moral one as well.

However, to abando11 my own culinary metaphorics- as I think l ought now -does not mean that 1 - or anyone else, for that matter - could gain any more privileged access to, Jet atone escape, what Fernando Ortiz once called the « cooking » of history (Palmié 1998) : a dialectical process of which our own scholarly endeavors cannot but fonn a part as well, and which - once we become aware of it - can gcnerate what Sidney Mi11tz (1989) once dcscribed as the dizzying « sensation of moving white standing still ». As modeling devices, ncither ackee and saltft sh, nor amala con quimbomb6 can realistically be viewed merely as interpretations of the past that would not, by the samc token, imply a moral and political vision of what such constructions of history ought to mean for the present 36

• Pcrsonally, I would make no bones of preferring the heuristic possibilitics opened up by an ackee and saltfish mode) of African Amcrican cultural history over a New Revisionism that rests on syllogisms for which amala con quimbomb6 only appears to offer an appropriate analogy. Either way, howe-ver, I see little choice but to regard both as mere « recipes »for representing a past the« rcality »of which ultimately remains within discourse, rather th an beyond it. This is a fact that forms an essential, and not merely an incidental (e.g. due to bad thinking, ideological distortions, improper methodology and so forth) conun-drum which wecan only acknowledge, but not supercede. If that sounds defeatistic or Pyrrhonic (depending upon one's stake in the debate- see Dianteill 2003), let us remember that none of this absolves us from the pursuit of rigorous scholarship. For what we can do, perhaps, boils down to what Sidney Mintz has taught us to do ail along: pay close attention to the co11crete local structures of opportunity and constraint (including those socially habituated dispositions or ideological regimes enabling their perception), and the larger, perhaps global, structures of power- in both its material and symbolic manifestations - with which they inescapably articulatc. For it is un der such conditions that ll' e ail weigh our behavioral options (including analytical moves), generate and reproduce om cultural worlds, thereby make our histories and cuisines ... and cook up stories about both. *

• Manuscrit reçu en mars 2005, accepté pour publication en novembre 2005.

NOTES

1. 1 thank John Peel for sharing this gem of contcmpornry Yoruba culinary wisdom with me. The condiment itsclf was invented by the Swiss nour merchant Julius Maggi (1846-1912) and fir st marketed in 1887. The history of its astounding spread throughout Africa and Asia, Io my knowledge, still awaits seri ons study.

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2. My sincere thanks go to Elizabeth Dunn and Elizabeth Ferry for o rganizing the fcast - a panel al the 2002 American Anthropological A ssociation Meetings - at which 1 fir st dishcd out an earlicr version of titi s paper. Subsequently, it has greatly profited from the comments and critici sms 1 have rcccil'ed from Greg Dcckett, Stefania Capone, Eli e Goldschmidt, Bobby H ill , Sidney Mintz, Salikoko M ufwene, and Mary Weismantel. Nccdless to say, ail crrors and inconsistencies are of my own ma king.

3. \Vith the outstanding exception of Price (1991) and Dawdy (2002), scholarly treatments of Caribbean foodways and cuisines have been fcw, far in between, and largely restrictcd to either bricf general overviews such as Parry (1955 ; 1956), Pcreda Valdés ( 1956), Cassidy (1961, pp. 188-202), Ortiz ( 1966), Villapoll (1977), Mintz (1987-1988), and Fleury (1993), or culturally relatil'ely « thin » accounts of the diet and nutritional status of slal'es compilcd from plantation account books and similar sources (c.g. Kipl e and Kin g 1981 ; Higman 1984, pp. 204-218). In marked contras!, recent years have seen a vir tual explosion of Caribbcana on the cookbook shelf. As Higman (1998) points out in a pioncer contribution modestly qualificd as an « hors d'œuvre », tit is literature, as wcll as the structun.•s of both local and global demand that appear to drive its production, lik ewise have yet to see seri ous study.

4. On whieh see, for example, Dell (1917), Bailyn (1955), Morison (1961), or the entrics for John Carter Brown or Thomas H. Perkins in Frccman Hunt's lir es of A111cricm1 Merchants (Hunt 1969 ( 1856-1858)).

5. On Dli gh's fateful brcadfruit adventure see Mackay (1974). As Parry (1956, p. 33) tells us, the fir st documentcd aekee slips to arrive in the Caribbean werc purchased by Jamaica's fir st Island Dotanist, Dr. Thomas Clarke, all egcdly from the captain of a slave ship in 1778. Bligh mcrely brought Jamaican ackce specimens to Kew Gardens after having finall y carried through his breadfruit mission in 1793 without incurring another mutiny. The firs t systematie descriptio n is found in the appendix on the Hortus Easte11sis of Bryan Edwards' The History, cfril and co111111ercia/, of the Bri tis/1 co/011ies in the West lndies ( 1793). See Rashford (2001 ).

6. ln titi s sensc, the case of ackce (like that of manioc) provide.s an excellent example in support of Camey's (2001) contention that traditional studies of crop diffusion have tended to severely rcstri ct our understanding of the cultural processes invo lvcd in the transfer of cultigcns. Just as commercial riziculture in the Americas might well not h;\l'e takcn off successfull y had the plant not diffused in conjuncti on wi th what she call s an en tire African « knowlcdge system » comprising both agrari an and culinary practices, sois the indigcnization o f ackcc in Jamaica (or of manioc in Africa) as a food crop (as opposcd to a mere botanical import) unthinkable in the absence of a parall el inst itutionalization of systems of toxicological knowlcdge of African (or, in the case of manioc, ultimately Native American) origin.

7. Curtin's (1969, p. 3) pithy definit ion of this system is as fo ll ows: « A complex cconomic organism centercd on the production in the Ameri cas o f tropical staples for consumption in Europe and grown by the labor o f Africans ». Hard to imagine, though it is, the Grenada-born calypsionian Slinger Francisco's (The Mighty Sparrow 1984) marvelous ode to Saltfl sh is unthinkable were it not fo r the histori cal realit y of the nutrit ional requiremcnts of the enslavcd labor that energized titis system - which, of course, is not to say that Sparrow's luxurious double-entendre, or for that malter, the various local use - culinary o r symbolic - of sait cod in the Caribbean could be reduced to such political economic considerations. ln fact, this is prccisely the point.

8. As the follow ing passage makes unmistakably clcar, Mint z and Pricc were not a t ail d iscounting the role of originally Afri can cultural forms in such processes. \Vhat they werc concerned with was the kind of « instant » history derivcd from mere fo rmai comparison - a problem M. G. Smith (1965, pp. 24-37) had raised as early as 1955 : « It should no longer seem sunicient », M intz and Price (1992, p. 41) write: « to main tain that Haiti 's twin cuit, the worship of Shango (Xango) in Trinidad orDahia, o r the use of oracles in Suriname arc simply examplcs of Afr ica transplanted, or evcn o f specifi c ethnie continuities o f culture. Our task must rather be to delineate the processcs by which thosc cultural matcria ls that were rctained cou Id contribute to the instit ution-building the slaves undertook to iuform their condition wit h cohercnce, meaning, and some mcasure of autonomy ».

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9. Of course, this may not have becn the only issue involved : since the late 1950s, the Caribbean rcgion had also begun to play a new rolc in discussions about the anthropological study of « complex socicti es », and the forms of domination characteri sti c of agro-industrial production sites on the pcriphery of the global capitali st system. Yet perhaps precisely because Caribbean and Afr ican Ameri can anthropology became overtly polit icized in the U.S. in the course of the l 960s, by the timc Mi ntz and Price fi rst launched their intervention in print (1976), the disciplinary sub-ficld to which it most directly spokc had arguably, and in some sense purposively, « missed the boat »of the hcrmeneu-ti c and symboli c approaches dominating « high pre.stigc » debate in the laie l 960s, opting instead for a political-econo111ic historicis111 or sociological e111piricis111, then hardly in the fo refront of American anthropologists' theoretical conccrns. And it was soon to becomc associated with prccisely those « foundationalist » epistemologics, locali zing stratcgics, and grands récits against which a new genera-ti on of anthropologists infl uenccd by feminist thcory, french poststructuralis111, lit crary crit icism, and postcolonial theory was beginning to rail. On the latter issue sec c.g. Mintz' (1989) own refl ecti ons on ethnographie subjectivity, theexchange betwccn Taussig (1989) and Mintz and Wolf (1989), as wcll as Robert Drightman's (1995) thoughtful critique of contemporary anthropological vanguardism. It is truc, however, that evcn before Taussig complained about the conspicuous absence of « cpistc111ic murk » in Mintz and Wolrs versions of marxism, an increasing policy orientation - c.g. in the debatc about M. G. Smith's plural society thcsis and R. T. Smith's Parsonian value intcgrati on mode! (sec Austin 1983 for a well -reasoned criti que of both positi ons)-steere<l Caribbcan anthropology away from questions the11 al the forcfront of the discipline as a whole, and may have lastingly contributed to what Carnegie (1992) diagnosed as a dccline of ethnographically oriented social science rescarch in the region. Tt may be in li ght of this that one needs to un<lerstan<l the somewhat vin<licationist tone in which Slocum and Thomas (2003) have rcccntl)• re-evaluatcd the contribution of Caribbean anthropology to the concerns of the discipline as a wholc.

IO. Thal it was publi shed in the samc year as Alex Haley's wil dly popular, but academicall y shunne<l if not excoriate<l «saga » / foots (on which sec Moore 1995) could not have helpcd matters either.

11. By and large, the current anthropological vogue for analytical metaphors dcrivcd from Carib-bcan ethnographie sccnarios is datable to Hannerz (1987) and Clifford (1988). Mintz (1996b), Khan (2001), and Trouill ot (2002) provide well-t akcn criti ques of metonymical extension of concepts ori ginating in Caribbcan ethnography to the analysis of a world allegcdly « in creoli zation ».

12. In the U.S., this curious oscill ation between origin-centered « Afri canist » and context-centered « Amerirnnist » emphases in the historical reconstruction of the cmergcnce of Afri can American cultmcs gocs back (al least) to the <lebates, bcginning in the 1930s, between Hcrskovits and his lifc-long opponent, the black Amcrican sociologist E. Franklin Frazier. On the intellectual and politi cal background of thesc de bat es - which not only coincided with the emergencc of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, but articulate<l wit h it in complex ways - see Szwe<l ( 1974), Jackson ( 1986), Will iams (1996), and Baker (1998). Pcrhaps not surpri singly, simil ar analytical polarities arc virtually absent in scholarship ori ginating in the Caribbcan, and have only recently emergc<l in Brazil. \Vhcthcr or not this may relate to an incrcasing infl uence of North American conceptuali zations of « race» on local scholarship in the latter country - as Bourdieu and Wacquant (1999) contendcd in a hotly debatcd polemic against what they perceive as imperiali st tendcncics in U.S. bascd scholarship - is a question wcll bcyond the scopc of this essay.

13. A point that Price (2001, p. 44) himself has rea<lil y conccdcd. 14. See, for cxample, Asiwaju (1976), Mudimbe (1988), Peel (1990, 2000), Arnselle (1993, 1998),

MacGaffcy (1995), Caron (1997), Morgan (1997), Moore (1998), or Northup (2000). 15. The tcrm rcfers to a formall y institutionalizc<l Afro·Cuban reli gious cuit group. Today's

Afro-Cuban « casas de santo » have oftcn been traced to the longstanding Ibcro-American institution of the « cabildo de naci6n )> - i.e. voluntary associations of cthnicall y alien individuals (i n this case of African origin) subor<linated to Spanish rule (Ortiz 1921; sec also ll rown 1993, 2003; Palmié 1993).

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16. Lluria de O 'Higgins (1994, p. 199 sq.) fcaturcs a fairly up-scale (one suspects: exile-enhanced) version of the dish servcd with plantain dumplings.

17. Morcover, givcn the then currcnt cxchange rate of 22 Cu ban pesos to the U.S. dollar, a quart of vegetable oil soldat prices ranging bctwcen U.S.S 2.25 to 2.75 in Havana's govcrnmcnt-owncd « ticndas de recaudaci6n de devisas» (TRD - more popularly known as« chopins») still rcprcsentcd a consi-derable investment. See Pérez L6pez (1995, p. 57), Segre, Coyula and Scarpaci (1997, p. 229 sq.) and LeoGrande and Thomas (2002, p. 352) for the development of disparities in purchasing power among different income groups in the national currency and dollarized market sectors.

18. Surprisingly, the one monograph/cookbook devoted to Afro-Cuban ritua l cuisine (IJolivar Ar6stegui and Gonzàlez Diaz de Vill egas 1993) does not mention thedish, but instead gives « arrozcon quimbomb6 » as a sacrifi cial food for the deity Babalu Ayé. In contras!, a sacrifi cial cookbook published by the American Yoruba Movement's Theological Archministry (Edwards and Ma son 1981, p. 58 sq.), features rec ipes for amalù with an okra stew as sacrifi cial foods for Chang6 - but « de-Cubanizes » the resulting dish by calling it « Ｙｾ＠ ila » (see Palmié I 995 ; Clarke 2004).

19. Villapoll (1977) notes an analogy betwecn Hispano-Caribbean culinary concepti ons of « sofrit o »(a multi-purposc base for savory food pn::parations consisting of on ions, garl ic, peppers and tomatoes) and the Yoruba concept of a/a (seasoning, literall y, pepper), but concedes their very different role in composing dishcs - the fir st rcprcsenting a flavoring base on which a variety of dishcs arc elaborated, the second representing a seasoning added al the end of the cooking process. lnterestingly, in the case of Carmen's amah\, the two conceptions converged upon a« sofrit o » based sauce added to a corn-mush.

20. On the former question see Zeven and Zhukovsky (1975, p. 68). As regards the latter, Alpern (1992, p. 31) adduces intri guing, though hardly conclusive, linguistic and ethnographie cvidcncc suggcsting that the Portugucse may have brought okra from the region of prcscnt-day Ghana to the IJight of Benin. If so-and pace Chambers (1997, p. 85)- the possible Twi etymology 11k11ru111a < okra might indicatc that the lgbo word okoro is, in fact, derivcd from an English phonetic corruption of a Twi tenn and may have replaced local designations derivative of the Portuguese « quiabo » in the southeastern IJight of Benin (which are documentable to this day) only at a fairly late date in the transatlantic slave tradc ! Sec note 23 infra.

21. Following Thornton in pushing the moment of« creoli zation »back towards « pre-At lantic » African contexts has recently emerged as a strategy to mediate the two positi ons (sec Berlin 1996 ; Heywood 2002). \Vhcthcr this salves any of the thcorctical problcms involvcd, or merely allows il s proponents to eat their African cake and creoli ze it , too, remains to be seen.

22. For the history of maizc and manioc in Africa sec Miracle (1966), Joncs (1959) and Alpern (1992).

23. The word it self presents yet another puzzle. A lready in 1875, Pichardo (1985, p. 511 sq.) gave a botanical identifi cation of « quimbomb6 » as llibiscus esc11/e11/11s or Abe/111osc/111s escule11111s, and ascribed an African origin to the tenu. As Ortiz (1924, pp. 400, 403) surmised (albeit on the basis of dubitable Angolan evidence) il s geographical origins lay in western Central Africa, and « quim-bomb6 » rcprcscnts a Cuban corruption of« quin'gombo ». This is barn out in Da Silva Maia (1961, p. 519) who gives « kingombo »as the Kimbundu tenn for okra, and « mbundu ki a nxi »(note the Portuguese spelling) as the Kikongo equi1•alent (in contemporary Kikongo the latter phrase, in fact, means «fruit of the land/carth »as opposcd to import cd food, or trcecrops). More surprising, perhaps, is the fact that Cabrera (1983, p. 532 ; 1984, p. 134) would note that the term « quimbomb6»is1101 used as a referent to li ibiscus esc11le11111s in the ritual language of Cuba's rcglas de conga whcre it is variously referred to as« balango », « ba1ie », « gondei » (« goudei »), « dimba », « ndimba » or« ngungo ». Diaz Fabelo (1998, p. 59) augments that li st with the following terms cull ed from the ritual lexicon of the Cuban « rcglas de conga»: « molondr6n » (in fact a common tcrm for okra in Puerto Rico), « nguenso »,«don go don go» and« nguindo ». As Salikoko Mufwene (persona! communication) tell s me, we ought to reckon with the interfercnce of West African languages in lexical patterns Cu bans now regard as pertaining Io« conga » rit ual registcrs.

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Palmié ACKEE AND SALTFISH VS. AMALi CON QU/.1100.1100?

24. On the historical patterning or Cuba's shwe intake sec Bergad et al. (1995) and Tornero Tinajero (1996). Morton-Williams (1964), Akinjogbin (1967) and Law (1977) still represent the besl introductions to the polit ical dynamics in the Bight or Benin tlrnt, by the early J 9th century, came to integrate the various Yoruba-spcaking politi e.s or southwestem Nigeria into the South Atlantic System as exporters or slaves to the last Iwo major slave-importing rcgions or the New World-Cuba and northcastern Brazil.

25. or course, Io speak or a« Central African sauce» is to potentiall y open up another Pandora's box or conccptual and terminological confusions. Foodways in the lower Zairc arc attcsted to in the copious Porluguese and ltali an missionary literature since the middle or the l 6th century (Balandier 1968, pp. 156-163). Yet the single one comparative study (Obenga 1992) is not only rather superfi cial, but foils to mention okra as a culinarily significant plant- although Vansina's histori cal lexicostatistics ( 1990, p. 84) trace its use Io a comparatively aneient linguistic stratum. Milheiros (1967, p. 25) givcs a 20th century Angolan rccipe which combines okra with peanuts (ginguba) and hot (New \Vorld) peppers (gindungo) - the latter or which (i.e. *ndongo) Vansina (1990, p. 290) identifies as « prolo western Ban tu» in form, though, or course, not substance. Chances are good that the okra sauces tbat enslaved Yoruba-speakers arriving in Cuba in the early 19th century might have been oflèred by already resident Central African and creole slaves would have born narnes phonetically close to mwamba, moamba, or muamba - neither or which survive in documented or contemporary Cuban speech. Yet even ir so, whether such mwamba would have been okra-bascd is open to questi on - not the lcasl in li ghl or the fact that okra fi gures promincntly mnong foods tabooed for practitioners or western Central African derived Afro-Cu ban rcligious traditions who, as Cabrera (1983, p. 532 sq.) daims, rear that the sli pperiness or ingcsted okra-preparations wi ll rcnder their ritual works (« trabajos ») cquall y « slippcry », hence incapable or« sticking » Io their intended objects or victims. \Vhether that may be a latter-day « Kongoism » or not J lcave to the New Revisionists to decide.

26. See Dawdy (2002) who makes a good case not only for the comparatively carly cmergence or this - particularly Cuban - corc/fringc pattern, but for its association wit h Cu ban nationali st ideolo-gies, evident as early as the mid- l 9th century.

27. An indicati ve case is the Asociaci6n Cultural Yoruba which is led by a group or sociall y white babalaos, and conspicuously houscd on Habana Vieja's Pasco del Prado in a beautifoll y restored colonial palace across the Parque de la Fraternidad Panameri cana. Although its currcnt director Antonio Castaiieda daims that the building was renovated with fonds donatcd by rcli gious clients and supporters from abroad, it is clcar that the choice or site and allocation or materials, permits, etc, cou Id only lull'e been rcalizcd through state patronage. A somcwhat diflèrent, but equally instructive case is that or the Cuban state's reluctant co-optation or patently U.S. Afr ican American-i nspired musical styles known as« Rap Cubano » (Fernandes 2003).

28. A good case in point is the 2004 U.S. Dcmocratic presidential candidate John Kerry's Mozambique-born, sociall y white wire Teresa Heinz Kerry's reportcd sclr-idcntifi cation as« A fri can American » (Swarns 2004). \Vhether one regards such a statement as meaningfol , nonscnsical, or evcn oflènsive dcpcnds upon whether one choosc.s to assign « racial » signifi cancc to prcdications of « Afri canity ». But it bears pointing out that the seeming paradoxicalit y or Heinz Kerry's daim tends to diminish or evcn vanish once one leaves the opcrational orbit of a peculi arly North American logic or race which, for historical reasons, makcs it diffi cult to think or « Afri canity » in the absence of sociall y black people (Palmié 2002).

29. On which sec Palmié (1996). Perhaps not incidentally, Bascom ( 1992) refraincd from specifying the contcxtual racial identity or the New World in fo rmants from whom he coll ected myth's about Obà's ear in Chang6's amala.

30. Cubans white or black are thus apt to consciously and conspicuously engage in cultural practiccs that they themselves understand as « African », while still - and sometimes in the samc situation (sa y, while eating am a la or discussing divination signs) - making highly stereotypical rcmarks about the worthlessness or people (( de bajo nive! de cultura )) («or a low levcl or culture») who often happen to be or darker skin color than they themselves. A particularly striking example or this logic

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was evident in South Florida in the mid-1980s, when an unprecedentcdly large contingent of dark-skinned individuals among the 125,000 Cubm1s arriving in the course of the so-callcd Ma riel Exodus prompted anxious responses not only from Miami's established Cuban community fearing for il s «white modcl minority status » (Pahnié 1989), but elicited hosti le reactions among Miami's practitio -ners of Afro-Cuban religions as \\'cil. When 1 was doing ficldwork there in 1985, the rancor (driven in part by claims of some new arrivais that thcir practiccs representcd a more authenticall y C11ba11 tradition) bctween rcsident santeros and black newcomers (many of whom bitterly complained of receiving a cold welcome from Mi ami's santcria communit y) was still very much al ive.

31. For the more rccent intcgration of elcments of« soul food » into the Halal cuisine of Afri can American Sunni Muslims and it s significance for - what possibly may be thought of as - a new oppositional polit ics of consumption see Rouse and Hoskins (2004).

32. As Poe (1999) argues on the basis of good evidence, the transformation of black southern cooking into a sclf-consciously « debatable » signifi er of Afri can-American identity (positive or negative) occurrcd in the process of the establishment of a scgregated restaurant industry in thosc northern urban ccnters that bccame targcts of the so-called « Great Migration »of Afri can Americans from the rural South to the industrial North in the second and third dccade of the 20th century.

33. Such as, for exarnple, French, ltalian, Russian, Poli sh, or Viet na me se cuisine, which was servcd in restaurants (prior to the beginning of the« spccial period »in 1991), but probably rarely - if ever -cooked at home. To my knowledge, " la comida chi11a » - i.e. the (heavily Cubanized) cuisine of the descendants of l 9th ccntury Chincsc indentured laborcrs is the only instance of an « e1/111ic c11isi11e » rccognized on the island. Although the development of collective representations of a« comida chi11a » on the island must have occurrcd long ago, it is, perhaps, not incidental that Cu bans of Chincse descent are also the only group all owed to maintain overtly descent-based associations in revolutionary Cuba.

34. Here one wondcrs to what cxtent the amazingly well-stocked cookbook shelves in Paris' L'Harmattan bookstore might generate a similar impression. Might self-identifi ed Martiniquais cookbook authors worry about a crceping de-authentification or alienation of their culinary lcgacy under the impact of French cuisine and consumerism in a mannercomparable to the ways in which U.S. African American cookbook writers do (or Cubans, for that matter, don't) ? Unprepared as l am to givc an answer, 1 suspect it might be rcvealing.

35. See Spivey (1999), Williams-Fortson (2001), Harri s (2001), Heldke (2001). The logic - and limit s - of such conceptions are vividly exemplified in Diane M. Spivey's The peppers, cmckli11gs, and k1101s of 1rool rookbook (1999). In this fascinating monograph that doubles (or triples !) as cookbook and gastropoliti cal manifesto, she self- consciously but cogently argues from a strong position of Afr ican American culi nary nationalism that since hominization is considered to have first occurrcd in Africa, the transition from mere hominid feeding patterns to the conscious culinary techniques and gustatory habits of homo sapiens would have occurrcd there as well . Such an argument, of course, would be entirely in accordance with the mode! Claude Lévi-Strauss (1966) erectcd - during a now by-gone era of anthropological confidence in the transparency of linguisticcategory-formation -upon the possibly universal human distinctions bctween the raw, cooked, and rotten, that may well mark the crucial step from feeding to eating, or in other words, from nature to culture. This, howcver, is not the course Spi,•ey steers by. Instead, what shc is after is a comprehensive but historically spccifi c - rather than universalizing - thcory of the primacy of Afri can culinary knowledge in the making of human foodways, from ancient East Afri ca to l ndia, China, and those « national » cuisine-s of the« modern West» that have dcliberately forgotten or rcpressed the African input crucial to their own historical emergence. ln an intriguing, and surcly deli berate move, she thus repli cates Melville Herskovits' (1941) strategy of explicating what he called «The Myth of the Negro Past » before proceeding to dcmolish it. Spivey's « myth »(as cull ed from contemporary food-writing) has thrce components :

- No food produets were indigcnous to Africa, thereby prccluding Africans from bcing capable of dcveloping any sort of cuisine prior to European intervention, and

- Afr icans came into contact wit h ninety-nine percent of the foods they consumed only as a result of the slave tradc, and

110

Palmié 1ICKEH AND SALTFISH VS. A.lf,1LJ CON QUIMBOMBO?

- African culinary traditions vary from country to country and have absolutely nothing in common (Spivcy 1999, p. 2 sq.).

If Hcrskovits drcw the conclusion : «The Negro is thus a man without a past » from a similar list of prcjudiced propositi ons, Spivey's implied rather th an state<l conclusion appears to be that « Africans hm·c no culinary past » - a myth she sets out to debunk. To what extent her global recovery of culinary « Africanisms » in virtually ail human cuisines ultimately explo<les any specific notion of Africanity - and so, in efièct, lea<ls Herskovits an<l the« New Revisionists » a<l absurdum - is a subject that I can not adequately <leal with in the space allotted here. Let mejust add that the very idea of Africa as a point of reference for its diaspora - as W. E. B. Du Bois ( 1946, p. 7) pointed out long ago - «stems naturally from the West Indies and the United States».

36. Nor is their status as mere intellectual inten·entions Io be taken for granted. It has bccome a commonplace regre t among anthropologists that the saturation of western public discourse with notions of« culture» that we ourselvcs have begun to doubt lcavcs us with a vocabulary contaminated by tendentious C\'cryday meanings. That this should corne as a surprise to any of us, surely belies another instance whcrc anthropology has been « caught napping » (Mintz 1996a, p. 303). For a trenchant critique of such laments sce Strathern (1995).

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