The focus of a cultural policy in traditional knowledge

Besides exemplifying similar phenomena in different regions and sociopolitical settings, these reflections also highlight one of the main issues at stake in interpretative processes of traditions: the construction of cultural policy. In Colombia there is an increasing interest on the part of the State to look at cultural culinary heritage in order to protect this heritage allegedly at risk, and to promote and make visible culinary traditions in order to develop Colombian

gastronomy. However, it seems that that approach poses a risk of its own in exoticizing and commodifying those traditional goods.

Although policies are a tool for governments and entire communities to work on achieving a particular social order, they operate at many different levels, having an increasing role in defining individual rights as well as both the public and the private subject. In this sense, as an effective instrument in the dynamics of power in modern societies it is useful, and actually necessary to look at them not just in their “constraining”, and even repressing dimension, but also at “how [they] fashion modern identities and ideas about what it means to be human” (Wedel et. al, 2005: 37).

The Policy for Knowledge, Safeguard and Promotion of Food and Traditional Cuisines in Colombia (adopted by the Ministry of Culture in 2012) focuses on the cultural aspects of food. In so doing, it opens up new discussions at the sociopolitical level, establishing a bridge between public prescriptions of action with the way in which people actually experience and respond to political discourses around food. By stating that through culinary knowledge and culinary practices people generate bonds of identity and belonging to a community and a particular region, and concluding from this construct that traditional ways of food production, preparation and consumption are an essential component of the nation’s cultural heritage (MC 2012: 9-10), the policy is directly pointing to the cultural nature of food and culinary practices. The Food Policy document states that traditional cuisines contribute to the overall “cultural welfare” of families and

individuals (MC, 2012:10). What “cultural welfare” means here is not entirely clear. What it is clear is that the policy identifies what it considers an essential link between the cultural identity of a social group and the food practices specific to that group and the essential role of traditions. This is something that had not been addressed before in policy making in Colombia and in national political debates in general.

In “Una cocina exprés. Cómo se cocina una política pública de patrimonio culinario”, Colombian anthropologist Juana Camacho addresses the relation between food, culture and politics (Camacho 2014). Although her analyzes is mainly focused on what she considers are some tensions and contradictions in the formulation of the policy59, she also talks about how it reflects an intention on the part of the state to work in a more comprehensive and substantial way in regard to cultural perspectives of food issues in Colombia:

(…) The proposal of a patrimonial policy for food and traditional cuisines of the Ministry of Culture is not without novel overtones. In the first place, because in food and nutritional policies, whose technical foci privilege the cost-benefit relationship, culture only appears rhetorically and as a matter of usage and consumption preferences. Therefore, public actions are geared towards nutritional education of the population to improve the quality of intake and nutrition. In second place, because within the current multicultural framework that governs national public management, culture has been associated mainly as a subject and attribute of ethnic minorities, for whom designing differential actions has been recommended, according to cultural, food and nutritional specificities, and to their condition of poverty, vulnerability and food insecurity (Camacho 2014: 172).

59 _{She is mainly arguing that the policy makes assumptions about the ideas of tradition and food and culinary}

authenticity, “naturalizing” these terms and obscuring the historical and current problematic about food and cuisines in Colombia (Camacho 2014: 172).

And even when Camacho bases her critical reading in the overall problematizing of the patrimonialization of culture that is operating as the main theoretical pillar of the policy, she also refers to the space that political discourses and public policies with new perspectives and distinct social aims, unfold in regard to debates about food. On the other hand, such discourses seem to offer a romantic or essentializing reconstruction of culinary traditional knowledge: “These perspectives privilege romantic, nostalgic, curious or festive aspects of food that appeal to feelings, morale and national and regional pride, and that leave little space for social and economic dimensions of gastro-politics60” (Camacho 2014: 179).61

This debate also exemplifies Hobsbawn’s claim about a relationship with the past through invented traditions, serving the goal of establishing or legitimizing institutions and showing how policy making is also contributing to shape social life, cultural values and codes of behavior (1983: 9). But again, as these reflections intend to expose, this construction should not be seen as a basic equation of elites or governmental agencies or the ones in power wanting to take advantage of a culinary traditional repertoire that belongs to marginalized communities. Neither should be seen as a happy picture of inclusiveness and equal rights and access to opportunities for everyone, or thorough knowledge and proper respect for other communities’ foodways. In the words of

60 _{Term proposed by Appadurai (1981) to refer to food as a means to illustrate a socioeconomic conflict.} 61 _{The idea that there is something alien, imposed, ideological in the construction of peoples’ identities in the design} of state laws is a very important one today in the Humanities and Social Studies. In her ethnographic book Cunning of Recognition (2002), Povinelli addresses this question through the problem of what she calls a liberal moral recognition of Australian aborigines in the context of discourses of nationalism in Australia. In what she describes as an optimistic Australian multiculturalism and the country’s laws about indigenous communities. As she shows, the nature of this liberal rationality and the pretension of perfectibility of the law are alienating the people of these communities. Australian multicultural laws seem to be a good example of the power of language to perform what Povinelli describes as a commodification of Australian indigenous culture. It is in this sense that she argues that in the understanding of these laws the indigenous becomes the melancholic object that symbolizes tradition: “the concept of the indigenous seems to be purifying and redeeming the ideal image of the nation” (2002: 26). This, in spite of the fact that national cohesion seems to be achieved precisely by a national collective will of aversion to the ‘barbaric’; by a consensus of fear of contamination.

Johnston and Baumann referring to the foodie culture “[this] is not a simple story of snobbery or cultural liberation, but is fundamentally constituted by the tension between a pull of democratic inclusion, and the desire to erect boundaries of exclusivity, distinction, and social status” (Johnston and Baumann 2015: 94).