Identities in Transition

The Enkidu Summer Conference 2007

June 1 - 5, 2007

Mexico City

in:

Commensality Narratives and Identity Dynamics in an Unbounded Ethnic Minority

Constance deRoche and John deRoche

Department of Socio-cultural Anthropology

Department of Sociology

Cape Breton University

Canada

Britain’s Tony Blair recently asserted that immigrants “have the right to be different and the duty to integrate.” He was speaking not only to stresses of a post-9/11, globalized world, but also about an implacable problem entailed by cultural diversity within nation-states, especially those that (like Canada) officially espouse multiculturalism. Blair’s catchy rhetoric overlooks the contradiction it embodies: How is it possible to retain ideals and practices redolent of heritage and supportive of collective identity while also assimilating into the structure of a host society? Put simply, integration compromises the freedom to differ, especially in the public sphere, where laws must be obeyed and work norms accepted. This does not imply that the private sphere is insulated from public constraint or micro-political tensions. 

While no habit of body or mind is inherently apolitical, some are more discretionary than others. They are more a matter of taste than of law or propriety. Among these is, quite literally, food as prepared and consumed in a Gemeinschaft setting. Commensality symbolizes in-group intimacy; partaking in food traditions extends the sentiment into the past. And eating is eminently quotidian; it repeatedly reiterates meanings in the everyday lives of ordinary people. Building on these principles, our paper examines heritage food as a crucial emblem of and fuel for personal and collective ethnicity among Italian-Canadians in the urban core of Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island. Cape Bretoners of Italian descent to have in many ways been absorbed by a larger community that is widely conceived as Scottish. Italians began migrating to the region at the turn of the 20th century, in response to the demand for labour occasioned by vibrant coal and steel industries. Impoverished compatriots continued to trickle in, searching for material betterment through the 1950s. 

At first concentrated in certain neighborhoods, some Italians – and their descendants in turn – moved away, many intermarried, most dispersed, and all acculturated. But there remain many who retain an Italian ethnic identity and consciousness, which is manifested concretely in talking about, planning for, and sharing heritage food. The phenomenological significance of heritage food has been one of the most striking emergent themes in the ongoing ethnographic study we began in spring 2005. As we moved from being member-participants (in an ethnic association) to participant observers and informal interviewers, we became aware of how often food serves as the focus of identity and collective activity. 

The proposed article will systematically develop our observations on how heritage food: (1) nourishes social bonding within the in-group; (2) serves as a resource for a positive presentation of ethnicity to outsiders; (3) helps carve out a sphere of identity in ethnically “mixed” marriages; and (4) mediates memory, the present, and the future, as it conveys a sense of belonging, to younger generations who have otherwise all but lost a sense of cultural roots.

About Constance deRoche and John deRoche

Profs. Constance deRoche (Socio-cultural Anthropology) and John deRoche (Sociology) have taught at Cape Breton University since the 1970s. They have published together in, for example, Canadian Ethnic Studies and the High Plains Applied Anthropologist. Among their separate works are contributions to the volume, Italian Lives, Cape Breton Memories.