Food Rules

In the two tiny Seltaman villages, situated in a remote corner of Papua New Guinea's central mountains, food rules divide the social world into distinct categories--men of different initiation statuses, women, children, and the elderly of both sexes. Ostensibly dictated by the ancestors, these eating rules are marked both by a mysterious stability and by equally mysterious sudden variations. Over the course of repeated visits to the Seltaman, Harriet Whitehead was caught up by the need to understand the kinds of eating restrictions that appear in so many societies around the world. Working against the strictly symbolic interpretive approach that has dominated the discussion of "food taboos" in the anthropological literature, Whitehead argues instead that food rules are the outcropping of diverse, dynamically interacting causes. With remarkable lucidity Whitehead teases out the multiple and sometimes conflicting strands of causality in the Seltaman case, giving us both a profoundly insightful account of Papuan village life and a new way of understanding culture. A strikingly original scholar, Whitehead turns to dynamical systems theory and the "modularity of mind" school of psychology to launch a penetrating critique of anthropology-as-usual and to set us on a new path toward understanding human lifeways and human performances. Harriet Whitehead is a research associate at Duke University, pursuing a study in cross-cultural child development. She is the author of Renunciation and Reformulation: A Study of Conversion in an American Sect, and the coeditor/author with Sherry B. Ortner of Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality.