SCOTT, EDIBLE ETHNICITY: Consumption is my favorite buzz word

“Far from being simply an administrative category, ethnicity itself became edible, and Sovietness something one could consume around the table.” As I did this reading, I kept thinking about what the organized attention to multi-ethnic cuisine meant for the Soviet imperial project. While this quote isn’t exactly what was on my mind the whole time, it does nicely encapsulate this strange line that was being toed. Food is interesting because eating is so integral to life, yet different cultures attach wildly different meanings to food and the procedures of eating. The centrality of Russian culture leaves room for the exotification and then popularization of Georgian cuisine.  I seems to me that this popular consumption was both a consumption of food and of Georgian culture.

This is a minor aside, but I was struck by how the consumption of Georgian food was so elitist, and then popularized because of its formerly elite status. I wonder how much of Georgian food’s status was directly correlated to Stalin’s status and how that correlation intersects with the exotification of Georgian food. Given that there was a Georgian diaspora of at least some substance, it isn’t as though those ingredients weren’t widely available because Georgian people and their culture weren’t around. I wish Scott had spoken on the status of Georgian people in the Soviet Union, and in Moscow, outside of the explicit context of the culinary scene. Scott says at some point that “the connotations of Georgian cuisine may have shifted over time, but its significance never faltered as it was welcomed into the Kremlin under Stalin, developed as an elite form of fine dining amid a return to luxury in the late 1930s, and popularized for the masses in the post-Stalinist period.” Again, I wish the treatment of common Georgian people was better explained, but I assume from this quote that Stalin’s status was a big decider in the popularization of Georgian food.

Back to my vague thesis-like statement, the public attitude towards Georgian food as something meant to be mass consumed is made to align with Soviet ideals. Scott notes: “one author profiling Kiknadze’s role in promoting Georgian cuisine wrote in Obshchestvennoe pitanie: “Soviet culinary workers affirm the rule that cuisine in our country never was and never will be a secretive [zamknutoi], isolated part of national culture. We can only welcome mutual cultural penetration [proniknovenie] and sharing; and the leading experts of national cuisine certainly should not keep their recipes a ‘mystery,’ passing them along like secrets only to the select few.”” This reads to me as a jab at the former elite status of Georgian cuisine among the Soviets, and also as a treatment of culinary culture as a kind of commodity that can be fairly distributed among the people. To take it further,  I think this is implicitly saying that culture of anyone belongs to everyone in the union.

Expanding beyond a strictly culinary focus, tourism in Georgia also has an air of exoticism, and a similar theme of access to an elite resource. Scott says “the development of Georgia’s tourist infrastructure in the post-Stalinist period made it possible for ordinary Soviets to get their own taste of the Georgian “good life.”” This may be just a function of how Scott said it(though I really don’t think it is), but this positioning of Georgia as a destination again centers Russia as basic and ordinary. To tie this back to my first paragraph, the “exotic” foods of the non Russian Soviet nations enrich the core of the Soviet Union, which is repeatedly implicitly and explicitly established as Russian (very notably so by Stalin, if you’ll recall his toast). They make it multinational, and spicy, and significant through their apparent diversity. And it is this fabricated quality of diversity that is produced as a narrative and consumed by the people along with their shashlik.

I’m basing my discussion question on this quote: “Soviet authorities in Georgia frequently criticized the vast amount of money spent on Georgian weddings as a “harmful tradition” and lampooned the conspicuous consumption of copious amounts of food and drink at the Georgian supra (feast) as an undesirable cultural trait. While the republic’s dining traditions provided [End Page 856] a rich repertoire for Georgian culinary specialists working in Soviet cities, they could sometimes appear jarring when experienced in their local context.”

My question is, where does the Soviet government draw the line on what is appropriate and consumable culture and what is against the Soviet project and why? And further, what makes a feast decadent, but not say a sculptural fountain in a desert city?

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5 Responses to SCOTT, EDIBLE ETHNICITY: Consumption is my favorite buzz word

  1. issilvers says:

    Scott’s discussion of the film Ne Goriui is instructive, I think, in addressing the question you ask at the end of your post. The film includes a song by actor Vakhtang Kikabidze highlighting several Georgian dining customs. Of this song Scott writes, “Kikabidze notably shied away from ethnic exclusivity; although he
    was intimately associated with Georgia in the Soviet imagination, the notion of rodina he employed in the song was open-ended and could be understood as pan-Soviet as well as national. In fact, he did not mention his native republic by name at any point in the song. Kikabidze thus recast the Georgian toasting tradition as one that need not be specific to Georgia, making it a suitable practice for all” (854). You describe the diversity of multi-nationalized Soviet cuisine as having a “fabricated quality,” and I would add that, in light of this quote, it is also anonymized. That is to say, Georgian culinary tradition could be in a movie (or in the Kremlin for that matter) as long as it wasn’t Georgian. I think maybe this approaches the final problem you pose: a Georgian toast at a Georgian wedding with Georgian food is so undeniably specific to Georgia that officials must encode it as decadent even though the same approximated custom in a Russian apartment might be perfectly Soviet.

  2. Dagan says:

    “And further, what makes a feast decadent, but not say a sculptural fountain in a desert city?”

    This was not an easy question to ponder, but I think I have something to propose. It is a contrast between gluttony and glory.

    To start, glory is the fact of bringing an abundance of water to a region that previously had very little. The accomplishment is trumpeted by letting it rush forth ostentatiously from monumental fountains. The overconsumption is a display of competence and dominance that is signaled to the whole world.
    What could have been glorious about Georgian overconsumption was if it was done in a place with a tradition of want, but this was not the case in Georgia. Rather, the norm there prevailed without the genius intervention required in Uzbekistan; while on the other hand, the Soviet mainland was used to hunger, homeliness, and thrift.

    I can see two forces being at work: the Russian reality, and the Soviet ideal. The Russian reality was just stated. The post-Leninist Soviet ideal had roots in ascetic revolutionary traditions that dictated temperance. The overconsumption here was not done for the benefit of the state or ideology, as in the fountains; it was interpreted as a lack of discipline, or as one of the non-proletariat backwards traditions that would need to be shed.

  3. lernerm says:

    I think to a certain extent, “acceptable” Georgian culture was that which could be assimilated into the general Soviet project of industrialization. An example of this would be the mass-bottling of Georgian sauces, and the location of Georgian food factories closer to the center. The Soviets wanted to make Georgian food culture not something that is inherently tied into ritual and custom, but something that shows both the diversity of the Soviet Union, and the ability of the government to distribute culture around the empire. In many ways, the US does the same with ethnic food, although instead of the government mandating this program, it is the market.

  4. Connor says:

    I’m glad your questions touch on the theme of consumption because it seems like so much of our class (and indeed the Soviet approach to culture) has focused on the production side. Scott’s identification of “Soviet kitsch” I think helps respond to the question of acceptable consumption. (832) He does not really bring it up again, but because “kitsch” implies intrinsic identification with popular culture or mass culture to the end of rejecting high cultural connotations means that it can get away with being decadent or ostentatious. I wish Scott talked more about why Georgian food remained so popular after Stalin since the article seems to attribute its elite status to his influence. The closest he seemed to get was early on when he described how Georgian culinary culture naturally fit quite nicely with the ideology of socialist realism. (833-4)

  5. whitec says:

    On the appropriateness or inappropriateness of culture, it seems that the relation of the practice to Socialist Internationalism and the creation of a unified Socialist Culture was at least part of the story. By spreading Georgian food around the country they were promoting the creation of a Soviet culture which would not be exclusive. Another part seems to have been how Georgian food was presented artistically, the images of abundance that were connected with the Georgian table were perfect for a portrayal of the success of the Soviet Union, whether true or not. As for where the line on Decadence was for Soviets, I loved the point that Dagan made with the distinction between gluttony and glory. The glory of making water abundant enough in a desert outweighed any idea of it being decadent, even when they were not providing water for the people of Tashkent to drink. Decadent feasts on the other hand would be gluttonous, and based on the Scott article done in the privacy of the Kremlin.

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