Keynote Speakers As a result of funding by the ARC-APFRN, South Australia’s universities and contributions by special sponsors, the Adelaide Asian Studies Group is pleased to announce that as of the end of March, presently confirmed international guests. [read more]

Gastronomy, Religion & Culture in the Asia Pacific

To register, please click here

As part of the week-long Crossing Borders conference being held at the University of Adelaide, this workshop will appeal to all who are interested in food culture. It will be structured around four papers presented by noted authorities in the Asia-Pacific food culture: Professor Tan Chee-Beng (Hong Kong), Dr. Nir Avieli (Israel), Dr. Jean Duruz (South Australia), and Dr. Nancy Pollock (New Zealand). Post-graduates and scholars in food studies and gastronomy are invited to take part in discussion of the papers presented. Papers will be made available in advance of the workshop online at the Research Centre's website. Participants are invited to read the papers before attending the workshop.

Workshop Program

8.30 Registration

8.50 Welcome and Introductions.

9.00 Keynote: Professor Tan Chee-Beng
(Chinese University of Hong Kong)
“Food and Religion and Chinese Culture Crossing Borders”

9.30 Keynote: Dr Nir Avieli (National University of Singapore):
"In Christmas we don't like Pork, just like the Maccabees:
Festive Food and Religious Identity in the Protestant Christmas Picnic in Vietnam".

10.00 Discussion

10.30 Morning Tea

11.00 Keynote: Nancy J. Pollock (Victoria University of Wellington):
 “Asian Influences on Pacific Gastronomy”

11.30 Keynote: Jean Duruz (University of South Australia)
“Growing up Transnational: travelling through Singapore’s
hawker centres.”

12.00 Discussion

12.30 Lunch & Close

Registration Details

Half-Day Registration (including morning tea and lunch): $55 or $45 (Post-graduate or Concession)

Dinner: $85 (with matched wines) @ the Adelaide Hilton Brasserie "Seriously South Australian" menu.

To register please click here.

PLEASE NOTE: The following program is provisional and may be subject to change due to budget constraints.

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Paper Abstracts

Prof. Tan Chee-Beng: “Food and Religion and Chinese Culture Crossing Borders”

For migrants and their descendants, food and religion are overt features that show both continuity and transformation, and are relevant to a people’s cultural identity. People like to eat the food of their cultural tradition; at the same time they are flexible to adopt new foods and make adjustment to their own food tradition. Similarly, people generally follow their indigenous religious traditions unless circumstances encourage them to convert to another faith. At the same time food used in rituals reflect important symbolic values. This paper will describe food and religion of Chinese overseas and in South China, and will show that Chinese culture as shown in food and religion transcends geographical boundaries, and the reproduction of culture involves both transformation and continuity as well as invention. Chinese food and religion can be better understood in both the local contexts and the across national borders.

Dr Nir Avieli (National University of Singapore): "In Christmas we don't like Pork, just like the Maccabees: Festive Food and Religious Identity in the Protestant Christmas Picnic in Vietnam".

Every Christmas, the tiny Protestant community of Hoi An  (central Vietnam) congregates and marks the day with a Service, a short ceremony and a communal picnic in the church yard. In this article, based on anthropological fieldwork conducted in town since 1998, I explore the meanings of the culinary features of the event. By analyzing the dishes and eating arrangements at the picnic I show how differing facets of the participants' identity: the religious, the ethnic and the regional, are exposed, defined and negotiated. I argue that while the eating arrangements hail ethnic Vietnamese identity, the dishes themselves hint for foreignness and 'double marginality': not only of a Christian minority among Buddhists but also of Protestants among Catholics. My findings suggest that the complicated relationship betweennation-states and marginal religious groups, as well as among members of differing religious communities within the same ethnic group, are often expressed in subtle practices that are easily overlooked by outsiders but are meaningful and evocative for the participants. The discussion is focused on the meaning of the culinary arena as a sphere of socio-religious negotiation, especially within politically authoritative contexts.

Nancy J. Pollock: “Asian Influences on Pacific Gastronomy”

This paper traces the patterns of transculturation emphasizing oriental influences on Pacific food ways in the past and in the present.  The paper shows that not only particular foodstuffs, such as taro, but also social uses of those foods, as in feasts, and the cultural values underlying food sharing have left a deep impression on Pacific island gastronomy.  Current  trends in food choices such as ‘chop suey’ for different social events indicate ongoing influences from China and Asia  The impact of Ramen noodles, and Chinese take-aways indicates a contrast between one type of food that reaches outer islands and rural areas (noodles) as opposed to the fast food culture mainly found in urban areas.  Adoption of new foodways  across national and cultural boundaries is a continuous process over space and time.

Jean Duruz: “Growing up Transnational: travelling through Singapore’s hawker centres”

The paper focuses on Singapore as a city of edible intersections and on a particular site of multi-ethnic eating, the hawker centre. The hawker centre, as a comparatively recent historical phenomenon, offers a resonant example of transnational space, constantly negotiated within ‘local’ memories. With the removal of street hawkers and their carts from the city streets, and the containment of hawker food within purpose-built structures, these centres emerge in collective cultural imaginaries both as sites of regulation (for example, in regard to hygiene, cleanliness and space allocation along ‘ethnic’ lines) and of spontaneous possibility (‘taking a chance’, for example, in regard to eating with ‘strangers’ or to sharing unfamiliar food). This paper is concerned with the hawker centre in two main respects – as a site for performing and remembering rites of passage into adulthood; as a site for practising cosmopolitan masculinity. In other words, the centre itself allows possibilities for generational, gendered and ‘ethnic’ identity work across time and across space – a form of ‘borderwork’ (Hodge and O’Carroll, 2006) that entails ‘safe’ and experimental eating within/across cultural borders while observing religious and cultural laws/taboos. Drawing on ethnographic material arising from interviews with Indian Singaporeans (living in, living outside, Singapore), the paper maps these friends’ memories of a specific hawker centre, established in the early 1970s on a housing estate in Singapore’s west. Stories of ritual movement within, and beyond, this centre’s boundaries, suggest the Singapore hawker centre as nostalgic and predictive space for the contradictions of transnational belonging.