George Mason University

Foodways Paper

To interview someone (or several people) to learn about one food dish that is in some way special, meaningful to them. This may be a food that someone in the group loves and continues to make while others in the group don’t like it at all.

Format of paper. Use conventional essay format. Feel free to use subtitles in the essay to separate one section from another if you’d like. Since you’ll be writing about your fieldwork experiences, you are welcome--and encouraged--to use "I" in this paper.

You’ll be presenting fieldwork findings and analyzing them. You may want to place your analysis in a separate section after you present your ethnographic data. Or, you may choose to interweave your interpretation with your fieldwork. Use whatever organizational pattern works best for you and your material.

You’ll be quoting what people say; be sure to double-check in a writing handbook the conventions for including quotations in a paper.

Current fieldwork practice, however, does experiment with alternatives to block quotations. For example, some people don’t like to put their informants words single-spaced in a block quote; they’d like to have them in the body of the text to make more equal the words of the writer and the words of the informant. You’re welcome to experiment in this way. Comment on these experiments when you write the section on your fieldwork.

You must include information about your fieldwork. Where you place it is up to you. Folklorists often include fieldwork details either at the beginning or the ending of a piece, sometimes in the first footnotes, and sometimes threaded throughout the essay.

Questions to explore in the body of your essay:


*Informant’s source.
When did your informant first hear about the food and learn to make it? Where? From whom? Persons present? When has your informant made the food since that first time?

*The recipe. How does your informant talk about the ingredients of the food? Record your informant talking about how the food is made. Some people tell the recipe out loud: "Well, you take a couple cups of flour, and you . . . "

How will you arrange your informant’s words on the page so they have the flavor of orally-delivered speech? Insert words like [laughs] or [long pause]. See me for ideas.

*Present performance context. What is the present performance context of the food; in other words, when is the food made now, by whom, for whom?

*Process of making the food. How is the food made: place, people, equipment, time of day and year. Changes in process, in ingredients, in tools. Why have the changes come about? What things have stayed the same and why? Ways of doing that are allowed, not allowed; proper and improper.

*Display. How is the food displayed, arranged on a serving dish? How is it displayed on the table and then on people’s plates? What other foods are put with it? Selection, arrangement, repetition: the art of this food dish.

*Serving. How is the food brought to the people? Who does this; who may not.

*Eating the food. How is the food eaten? What behavior isn’t tolerated? Who sits where during the food event?

*Clean up. How is the food cleaned up, disposed of ? Can it be thrown away? Kept?

*Your appraisal of your informant's folklore repertoire. What other traditional foods does your informant make? What other items of folklore does your informant use: family stories, jokes, songs? Other traditional material culture items? Any relationships between this food he makes and his other traditional

*What stories are associated with this food? Was there a particular time your informant made this food and something happened? Record his/her version of the story or tell your version of the story. Jokes associated with this food? Food fights? Has the food been used to tease other people? Issues of in-group (esoteric) and out-group (exoteric) behaviors?

*Your informant’s interpretation of the food’s meaning and function. If your informant talks about what the food or its preparation means to him or her, record what he or she says.

If your informant doesn't offer, ask what the story means to him or to her. Ask why he or she makes it. Ask if it is one of his or her favorites, for example. Ask if the food reminds him or her of anything from the past. (See how the squash pies brings back childhood memories of the cellar storage areas for the women of Allen’s Neck in Kathy Neustadt’s study Clambake.)

What does s/he think of its smell, color, texture: remember the senses in your fieldwork.

*Your interpretation of the food’s meanings and functions. In your opinion, why does your informant make this food the way s/he does? What does the food and its preparation mean to him or her?

--Use some of the concepts we’ve discussed to interpret your foodways. Although it sometimes feels uncomfortable to us to analyze personal materials such as our family’s foodways, I am asking you to write such an analysis. Consider some of the following: twin laws of variation, communal aesthetics, ritual and festival, communal eating, rites of passage, folk group, esoteric/exoteric, mean and grand meal, conspicuous display and consumption, symbolism, function, the senses, aesthetics of presentation, invention of tradition, life cycle, ownership and deference, process, the performance of identity, gender, class, race and ethnicity, negotiation, relationship of the individual to the group, repetition, traditional and outsider art, feeling responsibility for passing on tradition, "tradition."

*Your comments on the fieldwork process.
When and where and with whom did you do your fieldwork: day, time, place, circumstances. How did you do your fieldwork? Describe your fieldwork process: did you use a tape-recorder? Did you take notes, photographs? What challenges did you face doing this assignment? What did you enjoy? What problems did you experience? What did you notice as you tried to fasten into print information that was told orally? Other observations?

*Other ideas you’d like to include.
_______________________

Examples of Northern Virginia Folklife Archive holdings on foodways:
96-1 Family Foodways: Biscuits; PA, NC --F. Edwards
96-4 Family Foodways: Cornbread; TN --S. Parmele
96-5 Family Foodways: Irish Soda Bread; Co. Cork, Ireland --L. Keller
96-6 Family Foodways: Polenta (Italian Am); PA, Auronzo, Italy --M. Shepard
96-8 Family Foodways: Pancit (Filipino Am); NJ, VA --K. Lopez
96-11 Family Foodways: Homemade Ice Cream; ND, VA --A Nepodal
97-53 Foodways: Sunday Soul Food Dinner; NY, DC --G. Brown
_____________________________

How I grade this paper:
Given your fieldwork situation, I look for ample contextual and performance details that you have been able to observe and record. Those are important because you need them for any analysis you might make. I especially look for the thoughtfulness of your interpretations.
_____________________________

FORMS: Northern Virginia Folklife Archive
Please deposit your research with the Northern Virginia Folklife Archive. Through the Archives, you can help preserve and teach others about the folklore and folklife of Virginia and the Mid-Atlantic states.

The Release Form. Part of fieldwork collection is discussing with your informant how you--and others--may use his or her oral materials. If you and your informant are willing, I will house your collection of his or her materials in the Northern Virginia Folklife Archive. Most universities with folklore courses have such archives where students and researchers can come and learn about local and out-of state traditions.

Here, at Mason, these archives are in my office. The people who have used them the most are students looking for paper ideas and guidance or students checking for versions of stories they've heard. I've had a few requests from researchers outside the university. And folklorists documenting the folklife of Northern Virginia for our state folklorist have used our collection.

The form you fill out will be for this paper only. Should you place other collected items in the archive, I'll give you additional forms for those papers.

Please come visit the Northern Virginia Folklife Archive (my office, Rob A439) during my office hours or check with me for extra hours. Look at the foodways research your GMU colleagues have done; these papers provide good models for you! See the partial list of Archive holdings at my website: http://mason.gmu.edu/~myocom.

Volunteer in the Archive. If you’d like to volunteer or sign up for an internship (ENGL 498) in the Archives and learn about folklore archiving, please come see me.

The Accession Form: This form gives us information about you and your informant(s) for our searchable data base. It’s important to fill it out with great care.

-- Yocom, February 2001


Home Page | Archive Holdings | Folklore Resources at GMU | Information for Contributors | About Us