Appetites and Aspirations in Vietnam: Food and Drink in the Long Nineteenth Century (AltaMira Studies in Food and Gastronomy) [Hardcover]

Erica J. Peters (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 17, 2011 | ISBN-10: 0759120757 | ISBN-13: 978-0759120754

In Vietnam during the long nineteenth century from the Tây Son rebellion to the 1920s, individuals negotiated changing interpretations of their culinary choices by their families, neighbors, and governments. What people ate reflected not just who they were, but also who they wanted to be. Appetites and Aspirations in Vietnam starts with the spread of Vietnamese imperial control from south to north, marking the earliest efforts to create a common Vietnamese culture, as well as resistance to that cultural and culinary imperialism. Once the French conquered the country, new opportunities for culinary experimentation became possible, although such experiences were embraced more by the colonized than the colonizers. This book discusses how colonialism changed the taste of Vietnamese fish sauce and rice liquor and shows that state intervention made those products into tangible icons of a unified Vietnamese cuisine, under attack by the French. Vietnamese villagers began to see the power they could bring to bear on the state by mobilizing around such controversies in everyday life. The rising new urban classes at the turn of the twentieth century also discovered new perspectives on food and drink, delighting in unfamiliar snacks or giving elaborate multicultural banquets as a form of conspicuous consumption. New tastes prompted people to reconsider their preferences and their position in the changing modern world. For students of Vietnamese history, food here provides a lens into how people of different class and ethnic backgrounds struggled to adapt first to Vietnamese and then French imperialism. Food historians will find a provocative case study arguing that food does not simply reveal identity but can also help scholars analyze people's changing ambitions.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Appetites and Aspirations in Vietnam is food studies at its best, but it is also much more. Erica J. Peters demonstrates, with both intellectual elegance and a deeply rooted sense of food, how culinary choices are a marker of historical change. Using a diverse array of sources, she goes against the grain to explore everyday life in Vietnam in the long nineteenth century, affording a penetrating insight into what Vietnamese people wanted to be in a time of economic struggle and colonialism, and into how ordinary people experienced habitus and change, adaptation and contestation, even creativity. Appetites and Aspirations in Vietnam is a gourmet meal that leaves the reader satisfied…. The wide range of narratives of food Peters explores … sheds new light on disparities of gender, ethnicity, and wealth. Food may have been a tool of imperialism; it certainly became a tool of nationalism in modern Vietnam. Nobody would have expected the history of a ‘fusion cuisine’ would tell as much. (Laurence Monnais, Université de Montréal )

A reviewer of the wide-ranging Appetites and Aspirations could evaluate this rich study along any number of axes: economic history, the history of imperial and colonial Vietnam, or the history of race and ethnicity, to name a few. Nonetheless, food is most emphatically Peters’s preferred ground and where she anchors her argument that French and Vietnamese used diet to shape radically divergent identities in colonial Indochina….It would be unfair to expect a study so ambitious to succeed equally well on so many fronts….Nonetheless, this fascinating and suggestive narrative of nineteenth-century imperial and colonial Vietnam will appeal to a wide range of general readers and specialists. (H-France )

About the Author

Erica J. Peters is co-founder and director of the Culinary Historians of Northern California and has written on various aspects of Vietnamese history and cuisine.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 271 pages
• Publisher: AltaMira Press (November 17, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0759120757
• ISBN-13: 978-0759120754
• Product Dimensions: 6.3 x 0.9 x 9.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,303,819 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Shameful lack of rigor February 1, 2013

By gentle reader

Format:Hardcover

This history of food and eating claims to be "devoted to telling the stories of ordinary people" in Vietnam and "how they used food to improve their social standing." While this is an admirable agenda, Peters relies almost entirely on French colonial sources. As a result, the voices of Vietnamese individuals are barely available, except via French interpretation, and the book's tone suffers from Peters' anxious but scattered critiques of her often racist and disparaging French accounts of "les Annamites." While the subject matter is fascinating and the data often rich, the book is crippled by a lack of rigor and focus, a tendency to be immersed in anecdotal and episodic storytelling, and a failure to develop solidly buttressed and scholarly arguments. Falling somewhere between a popular trade book and a book for specialists in Vietnamese and Southeast Asian studies, this book will be an especially frustrating read for historians, as Peters consistently fails to cite any literature that would frame her intervention in a broader context of postcolonial historiography.