Food, self and identity
Abstract
Anthropology offood Anthropologie de 1' alimentation Claude Fischler Food, self and identity Food is central to our sense of identity. The way any given human group eats helps it assert its diversity, hierarchy and organization, and at the same time, both its oneness and the otherness of whoever eats differently. Food is also central to individual identity, in that any given human individual is constructed, biologically, psychologically and socially by the food he/she choses to incorporate. This paper is intended as a speculative survey of the ways in which food is related to identity formation. The approach it adopts, however, is based on the realization that the human relationship to food is obviously a complex one. It combines at least two different dimensions. The first runs from the biological to the cultural, from the nutritional function to the symbolic function. The second links the individual to the collective, the psycho- logical to the social. Yet a rapid overview of the abundant literature on human food suggests that few of the salient works on the subject have directly addressed this multidimensional character. While the social sciences, after long neglecting the area, were discovering food and eating as a field