formal rights within the societies that they move into. In this context, both colonizing and colonized groups forge forms of identification that are characterized by blurred boundaries, practices, and values. Hence, individuals are motivated to perform their identity by declaring and demonstrating their attachment to cultural products that root them into a culture, for example, by expressing their love for or attachment to the music, food, and forms of social conviviality that are identified as proper to the people of a territory. The more a foreigner performs as a local, the more likely it is that she or he will be accepted by the host society.22 Hybrid identities and cultural practices are now commonplace terms to describe emerging cultural products and the identity of those who find them meaningful in crafting their selves. This hybridity, as Bhabha (1994) argues, generates forms of ambivalence that can lead to unstable, changing forms of identification, including what he has called ‘colonial mimicry'. In Yucatán I found that the latter often translates into the actions and discourses of Yucatecans who accept unquestionably the authority of central Mexican or other foreign viewpoints and criticize local practices as parochial or ‘uncouth'. The economic, political, and religious institutions linked to the nation-state continuously support central Mexican culture, leading to the local perception that the presence of central Mexicans and the enforcement of their cultural views constitute an act of aggression and place a burden on the local society. The relationship between Yucatecans and outsiders, however, varies according to the groups involved. Immigrants from regions other than the central Mexican highlands have gained greater acceptance, and resentment against them seldom (although not rarely) surfaces.
At the beginning of this twenty-first century, the population of Mérida is undeniably multicultural. Correspondingly, the market for non-local cuisines has also grown over the last three decades. From an unmarked consumption of food, Yucatecans have come to appreciate cuisines (including a variety of Mexican regional cuisines) that could be considered somewhat exotic for local taste. Yucatecan and Mexican cuisines are noticeably different: Yucatecan cuisine has developed by avoiding the blueprint of a national Mexican cuisine, finding greater affinity with European and Caribbean traditions. Yucatecans have grown to perceive themselves as different from the rest of Mexico—socially, culturally, and morally.23 In the performance of identity politics, regional cuisine is understood locally to reflect the values of the Yucatecan population at large, which are, in the same move, affirmed as different from Mexican values (Ayora-Diaz and Vargas Cetina 2005a).
While some differences between regional and national culinary traditions are often explained by environmental and ecological differences, we need to revise this explanation, drawing from the history of the difficult relationship between these regions (described in more detail in chapter 1). In short, there are accounts that suggest that Yucatán developed in practical isolation from the rest of Mexico, as a world apart, as suggested by the epigraph (from Moseley and Terry 1980b: 1) at the beginning of this introduction.24 However, this was not the case. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Yucatecans perceived Mexico as an interventionist, colonialist power that sought to undermine the economic autonomy of the state and to remove regional elites from positions of authority, putting in their place either individuals and families from Mexico or Yucatecans who were sympathetic to the centralist project of the national government. In the context of this antagonistic relationship, the Yucatecan elites expanded their commercial and cultural ties with Europe, the United States, and the Caribbean, in particular with Cuba, Puerto Rico, Colombia, and Venezuela. The peninsular market with Europe, mediated by Cuba and Belize, fostered the inclusion of European ingredients into the regional cuisine. While the culinary field spread all over the state, it was in cities where the wealthy lived that the inchoate gastronomic field began to emerge. The dishes that today are iconic of the Yucatecan gastronomic field developed, gradually, in Mérida, Motul, Ticul, and Valladolid, the main cities of the state of Yucatán.25 Hence, Yucatecan identity and gastronomy need to be seen as a two-pronged construction: on the one hand, they underline the specificities of local culture and society and local-cosmopolitan relations; on the other, they affirm the Yucatecans' opposition and resistance to central Mexican culture and power structures. In this historical context, food in Yucatán, as elsewhere, plays an important part in drawing the boundaries of Yucatecan culture and in shaping the cultural politics that defines who belongs to that culture and who is excluded from it (Ayora-Diaz 2009).
The Performance of Research in Yucatán
Traditionally, ethnographic fieldwork has been conducted in distant places, within cultures that are typically different from the anthropologist's home society and culture. For many years anthropologists have been inclined to deploy rhetoric and practical strategies to make fieldwork at home acceptable, masquerading the familiar as exotic. This enterprise was considered necessary so long as anthropology was understood to be a discipline concerned with the ‘Other' (di Leonardo 1998). The reflexive critique of anthropological and other cultural texts, which began in the late 1970s, made it possible to question and refashion the definition of anthropology's task (Clifford 1988; Clifford and Marcus 1986; Fabian 1983; Marcus and Cushman 1982; Marcus and Fischer 1986; Said 1978). No longer concerned with classifying and ordering otherness, some anthropologists, from one wing of the anthropological spectrum, sought to redefine the discipline as an interpretive task (Geertz 1973; Rabinow and Sullivan [1979] 1987).
To reach an understanding of local culture, it is necessary for the anthropologist to engage in intersubjective, dialogic negotiations of meaning (Clifford 1988; Tedlock and Mannheim 1995). We anthropologists must grasp the native's understanding of the world in order to represent it (Geertz 1983). Although this ambition has been both strongly criticized and forcefully defended (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Geertz 1990; Marcus and Fischer 1986), there is some consensus on the need for anthropologists to get as close as possible to the native's perspective. At the same time, in the name of the ‘science' of anthropology, some anthropologists defend the contention that a sense of distance has to be preserved to allow for critical reflection and analysis. The directive to preserve the geographical distance between the observer and the society that he or she observes has complicated the ambition to grasp the local point of view. To find their ‘Other', anthropologists are forced to travel geographically and to displace themselves in time. For a long period, it was not deemed acceptable to look closer to home, as the early reception to Campbell's (1964) and Friedl's (1962) work illustrates. Both were criticized for studying Greek rural society, which was not exotic enough for the rigidities of the anthropology of their time. This proscription survives today, as often anthropologists who study their own society (which could be any so-called Western/ized society) are accused of seeking comfortable places. A segment of the academic status quo tends to dismiss studies that focus on shopping malls, kitchens, urban homes, restaurants, musical productions, and many strands of consumption-related issues. National or regional identity has become a regular topic to study somewhere else, but it is still largely proscribed ‘at home'—unless the research is being conducted among marginal or ethnic groups (see Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Passaro 1997).
I find, however, that there are advantages in approaching my ‘own' culture. I have partaken of the general embodiment and naturalization of taste, as have most Yucatecans. I grew up in an environment in which Yucatecan meals were the norm and the ‘proper' taste and texture were always expected. However, after living 14 years abroad and in another Mexican region (Chiapas), and, moreover, after becoming an anthropologist, I was able to slip between my local knowledge of food culture and moral values and my ‘expert' knowledge as an anthropologist who cannot bracket historical and political contexts and conditions that are critical in establishing cultural ‘necessities'. Hence, given that my main concern in this book is to explore the relationship between a form of cultural production and consumption (Yucatecan gastronomy) and the ways in which it intersects with the local politics of identity, I have sought to unpack the local structures of the social field, to trace its transformations, and to explore the strategies that seek to establish the boundaries of what locally they/we construct and understand as ‘regional culture' and local cultural productions.
To describe the gastronomic field, I have had to deal with at least
