The cultural structuring of mealtime socialization.

Anthropologists have long considered ways in which food preparation, distribution, and consumption authenticate both social order and moral and aesthetic beliefs and values. Less frequently examined are the socialization processes that promote continuity and change across generations in the sociocultural life of food. This chapter considers mealtimes as cultural sites for the socialization of persons into competent and appropriate members of a society. Cultural sites are here conceptualized as historically durable yet transformable, socially organized and organizing, and tempospatially situated arenas, which are laden with symbolic meanings and mediated by material artifacts. Cultural sites are given life through recurrent social participation and longevity through efforts to socialize novices into the predilections, sentiments, and actions that undergird meaningful participation. This notion of cultural site assumes that members will act in conventional ways, yet not necessarily share common understandings and knowledge of the situation at hand (Eagleton, 2000; Garfinkel, 1967; Geertz, 1973; Sapir, 1993). It follows Bourdieu in approaching culture as an ever changing set of dispositions, strategies, and social positions that members contingently enact in relation to one another within situations and fields of local relevance (1977, 1990a, 1990b). With this notion of cultural site in mind, mealtimes can be regarded as pregnant arenas for the production of sociality, morality, and local understandings of the world. Mealtimes are both vehicles for and end points of