Freezing in the “Culinary Triangle”: Nutrition Practices among the Reindeer Herders, Hunters, and Fishermen of Western Siberia

Abstract

This article has a three-level structure: starting with specific examples in the field of food ethnography, I move on to the level of classifications that differentiate between raw and cooked, edible and dangerous, and alive and dead. This narrow focus on classifications, which has been used in anthropology for decades as a working language for describing traditions and practices, opens the way to the next level, where I attempt to make a theoretical intervention in several areas of anthropological knowledge. First, by addressing the concept of “technology” in each case, the study questions the appropriateness of the opposition between nature and culture, where “technology” is expectedly placed in the domain of culture. The next step, which highlights the controversial nature of the boundaries between technology and nature, is made possible by focusing on interspecies relationships. For example, the symbiotic partnership between a moose and a parasite is not an intellectually defined technology, but it is taken into account by hunters when harvesting elk meat. The perspective of multi-species ethnography allows us to superimpose the tradition of nutrition studies on the analysis of a border between the living and the inanimate: this move allows us to overcome the opposition of “dangerous” and “safe” interpreted mostly as “pure” and “unclean”. Further I raise the question of continuing forms of life that are mutually embedded in each other: it is the lasting life that is sometimes more dangerous and unclean than the presence of the dead. Finally, an important point of intervention in this article is a debate on processuality and reversibility of all actions and events connected with food. The concepts described above can be revised considering the multiple temporalities present in each ethnographic example. By looking at time and the rhythms of processes, we can question technology (for example, culinary technology) as an inventive, sign-rich, controlled process. This article offers a look at pauses, delays within various processes, and accidents that are part of a non-random interspecies relationship with their own logic and living semiosis.