Food, Community, and the Spirit World: An Indian Village Study

This is a detailed ethnographic study of food beliefs and practices in two villages of Hassan District, Karnataka State (formerly Mysore), India: Chinnapura and Bandipur. The author is an anthropological linguist who resided in the locality for almost two years in 1966-67. He provides the reader with an unusually detailed view of the intersections of language, food, and social relationships. Food is viewed as an important structuring aspect of the Hindu world view, a way that people symbolically represent and reproduce their own identities, gender relationships, and the differences among local castes and sub-castes. The roles of foods and food exchange in weddings, ancestor ceremonies, and other family ceremonies is explored. The area visited no longer exists, having been submerged by a dam project; but the reader has an opportunity to probe deeply into the life of a community as it was fifty years ago.