Power struggles and social positioning: Culinary appropriation and anxiety in colonial Vietnam

Abstract

Peters demonstrates that during the French colonial period in Vietnam, language about food revealed people’s anxieties about the changing social hierarchy. Contemporary advertisements, travel narratives, administrative reports, ethnographies, folktales, missionary correspondence, and newspaper editorials help illustrate how new food practices disrupted rigid social hierarchies, whether those hierarchies pre-dated the French arrival in Southeast Asia or emerged during the colonial period. Peters argues from this textual evidence that French people bore the most anxiety in the colonial environment: the French developed a cultural norm against eating local dishes, while other groups such as Chinese immigrants or the Vietnamese urban middle class appreciated opportunities to try previously unfamiliar foods. Generally, Peters argues that those aspiring to rise in society expressed more openness toward trying new ingredients and new dishes than those fearful of losing their social position.