588
CLAUDE LEVI-STRAUSS
principal modes, attested in innumerable societies by myths and rites
which emphasize their contrast: the roasted and the boiled. In what does
their difference consist? Roasted food is directly exposed to the fire;
with the fire it realizes an
unmediated conjunction,
whereas boiled food is
doubly mediated, by the water in which it is immersed, and by the
receptacle that holds both water and food.
On two grounds, then, one can say that the roasted is on the side
of nature, the boiled on the side of culture: literally, because boiling
requires the use of a receptacle, a cultural object; symbolically, in as
much as culture is a mediation of the relations between man and the
world, and boiling demands a mediation (by water) of the relation
be–
tween food and fire which is absent in roasting.
The natives of New Caledonia feel this contrast with particular
vividness: "Formerly," relates M.
J.
Barrau, "they only grilled and
roasted, they only 'burned' as the natives now say. . . . The use of a
pot and the consumption of boiled tubers are looked upon with pride ...
as a proof of ... civilization."
A text of Aristotle, cited by Salomon Reinach
(Cuites, Mythes, Reli–
gions,
V, p. 63), indicates that the Greeks also thought that "in ancient
times, men roasted everything."
Behind the opposition between roasted and boiled, then, we do in
fact find, as we postulated at the outset, the opposition between nature
and culture.
It
remains to discover the other fundamental opposition
which we put forth: that between elaborated and unelaborated.
In this respect, observation establishes a double affinity: the roasted
with the raw, that is to say the unelaborated, and the boiled with the
rotted, which is one of the two modes of the elaborated. The affinity of
the roasted with the raw comes from the fact that it is never uniformly
cooked, whether this be on all sides, or on the outside and the inside. A
myth of the Wyandot Indians well evokes what might be called the para–
dox of the roasted: the Creator struck fire, and ordered the first man
to skewer a piece of meat on a stick and roast it. But man was so ignorant
that he left the meat on the fire until it was black on one side, and
still raw on the other.... Similarly, the Pocomchi of Mexico interpret
the roasted as a compromise between the raw and the burned. After the
universal fire, they relate, that which had not been burned became white,
that which had been burned turned black, and what had only been
singed turned red. This explanation accounts for the various colors of
corn and beans. In British Guiana, the Waiwai sorcerer must respect two
taboos, one directed at roast meat, the other red paint, and this again
puts the roasted on the side of blood and the raw.
