From nature to culture: Food and gender in rural Šumadija in the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century

Abstract

In this paper, we aspire to uncover the power relations and the ways of conceptualizing gender in rural Šumadija in the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century by researching practices and discourses that concern production, consumption, preparation, the acts of serving, and the ingestion of food. The historically and culturally constructed binary oppositions between nature and culture, the open and the closed, and male and female, will furthermore illustrate the institutionalization and the structure of male domination. While the production and consumption display interdependence of genders - with the symbolic supremacy of men in open and public spaces (the control over Nature and within the public sphere) - the preparation, the acts of serving and ingesting the food, understood as cultural processes related to the domestic sphere, required the order which includes the absolute precedence of men over women. Nonetheless, women ruled autonomously over the wooden constructions used to produce and store milk („mlekar“), thus providing the children with privileged access to the products at their own accord. Quite unexpectedly, the historical analysis showed that cooking as a remarkably female activity had the tendency to occasionally fall within the responsibilities of men without contesting the institutional framework of male domination.

Keywords

• food
• gender
• šumadija
• the culinary triangle
• claude lévi-strauss