ANTHROPOLOGY OF FOOD: THE PIG CONNECTION

This talk takes the anthropology of food as a starting point to discuss the tradition of ceremony and culture surrounding food.

The Pig Connection: Cooking for a wedding party in Solomon Islands

Excerpt from my field diary.

“When I arrived at Tuku, a section of the village of I’alofo, I saw a huge motu, a sort of oven, consisting of a circle full of stones with a radius of at least two meters. Above the stones, glittering from the fire that had been burning on them for hours, people were laying down large banana leaves. And they were running back and forth to lay on these leaves an unimaginable amount of kasava, kumara and taro, and other kinds of tubers. Their words travelled quickly, giving continuous orders so that everything was done with precision and in the shortest possible time. This is because, when making the motu, you should not waste any heat, and trap it inside those banana leaves. Otherwise, the stones will be too cold when the time comes for the main dish: 11 pigs that we are in charge of killing and butchering in the middle of the deep forest, before the sun rises.”

Rodolfo Maggio is an anthropologist currently working as Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Oxford. He has conducted ethnographic research in a variety of cultural settings, including the metropolitan areas of Rome and Prague, the suburbs of London, and the Asia-Pacific Region. He uses anthropology as a way to entertain, educate, and inspire himself and the people who listen to the stories he has collected around the world.

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