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CLAUDE LEVI-STRAUSS
in the bush (outside the village community) and sedentary life (inside the
village). From this comes a subsidiary association of the roasted with
men, the boiled with women. This is notably the case with the Trumai,
the Yagua and the Jivaro of South America, and with the Ingalik of
Alaska. Or else the relation is reversed: the Assiniboin, on the northern
plains of North America, reserve the preparation of boiled food for men
engaged in a war expedition, while the women in the villages never use
receptacles, and only roast their meat. There are some indications that
in certain Eastern European countries one can find the same inversion of
affinities between roasted and boiled and feminine and masculine.
The existence of these inverted systems naturally poses a problem,
and leads one to think that the axes of opposition are still more numer–
ous than one suspected, and that the peoples where these inversions exist
refer to axes different from those we at first singled out. For example,
boiling conserves entirely the meat and its juices, whereas roasting is ac–
companied by destruction and loss. One connotes economy, the other
prodigality; the former is plebeian, the latter aristocratic. This aspect
takes on primary importance in societies which prescribe differences of
status among individuals or groups. In the ancient Maori, says
Prytz–
Johansen, a noble could himself roast his food, but he avoided all contact
with the steaming oven, which was left to the slaves and women of
low birth. Thus, when pots and pans were introduced by the whites, they
seemed infected utensils: a striking inversion of the attitude which we
remarked in the New Caledonians.
These differences in appraisal of the boiled and the roasted, depend–
ent on the democratic or aristocratic perspective of the group, can also
be found in the Western tradition. The democratic
Encyclopedia
of Dide–
rot and d'Alembert goes in for a veritable apology of the boiled: "Boiled
meat is one of the most succulent and nourishing foods known to man.
. . . One could say that boiled meat is to other dishes as bread is to
other kinds of nourishment" (Article "Bouilli"). A half-century later,
the dandy Brillat-Savarin will take precisely the opposite view: "We
professors never eat boiled meat out of respect for principle, and because
we have pronounced
ex cathedra
this incontestable truth: boiled meat
is flesh without its juice.... This truth is beginning to become accepted,
and boiled meat has disappeared in truly elegant dinners; it has been
replaced by a roast filet, a turbot, or a matelote" (P
hysiologie du gout,
VI,
~2).
Therefore if the Czechs see in boiled meat a man's nourishment, it
is perhaps because their traditional society was of a much more demo–
cratic character than that of their Slavonic and Polish neighbors. One
could interpret in the same manner distinctions made-respectively by the
