Finding the right season(ing)?

“It is the wrong season for bui [a baobab fruit drink],” Maria told me, “but for you it’s okay, it will be okay not to wait. Your body won’t know the difference.”

It was winter in New York, and I was standing among piles of dried fruits, tubers, and grains that Maria and I had collected from the shelves of her shop in south Harlem. 

My assignment was to find, learn about, and try to cook a cuisine that was unfamiliar to me, but available near my neighborhood; Maria, along with the two younger women she had working with her, was trying to help me with what she clearly thought was a task beyond my skill level (“call me,” she said, giving me her phone number, “when you cannot make this and I will tell you what to do.”). I chose to visit “Little Senegal,” a few blocks of primarily Senegalese (but also other West African) businesses – everything from restaurants and food markets to hardware and taxi services. Really, not that much different from most blocks in Harlem; slightly city-worn, multi-colored awnings over glass windowed storefronts, letters painted or pasted onto the windows to advertise products and sales, a few people hanging out in doorways here and there. The main difference is heard, rather than seen, as these small groups of people are chatting in a mixture of French, Wolof, and sometimes other West African languages. I can hear the afternoon passing in the rise and fall of these conversations outside the door as we sort through the bags and bundles on the counter.

            Maria pulls out a bag of dry, green, crushed leaves, which she tells me are called “mboum.” She adds that this is also the name for the dish made from these leaves, which is the best Senegalese dish, but one that I will not be able to eat because I am not African. “Maybe,” she amends reluctantly, “if you had been to Africa. Maybe then. But you, no, you will have trouble eating it. Maybe after awhile you can learn to cook it, but you will not know how to eat it.” Nonetheless, she piles my arms high with the other necessary ingredients, including peanut powder, ground millet, red chili flakes, and dried baobab fruit and ginger to make the accompanying bui drink. After this, she and the other women argued for a bit about the right way to cook the mboum (with oil or without, mixing the spices as a paste first or boiling them with the meat), and sent me home with the injunction to mix the leftover millet with milk for the next morning. In Senegal, she says, they say that if you eat the millet mixed with milk, then you will live forever (“or for a very long time. But I don’t know if that’s true here, it’s just what they say in Senegal”).

            I should note that this short encounter just about encompasses my limited knowledge of Senegal, the Senegalese diaspora in New York, and Senegalese cuisine. I make no attempt to explain this interaction in terms of broader social, cultural or political concerns. Instead, I am interested in the questions and possibilities that were raised, as Maria and I talked, about the boundaries of intelligibility and temporal experience. I am interested in how these boundaries were being generated by (and perhaps negotiated through) the bags of food products, carefully prepared and shipped from thousands of miles and countless hours away yet still tentative, not-fully-produced, needing attention. There is a vast literature on the ways in which preparing and eating food does not just measure time, but in fact produces it, and I was prepared to think about how this was accomplished before I arrived at the shop. However, I was surprised by the way in which those modes of temporal production immediately had to be reshaped to conform to what seemed to be the limitations of my own body to engage with them. I could perhaps cook, eventually, but never eat properly (in a sense that seemed to have little to do with taste when I asked). I could drink the bui but only because on some level my body could not sense its (un)seasonality. There are obvious questions to be asked, too, of the way in which the multiple possibilities within the foodstuffs could be mobilized in relation to place, as well as to the body – the millet required not only a knowing hand and the addition of milk to produce longevity, it might also require a particular place and community (or at least, not this place).  My own sense of the limitations of the assignment and my participation in it also had to be adjusted. I anticipated, admittedly naively, being able to locate elements of a cuisine, learn how to make them, and then do so; my sense of how temporality might be implicated in this process would derive from these steps. For Maria, however, the assignment was immediately about the act of consumption. For her, whether or not I would be able to drink or eat the end product was much more significant (or at least less flexible) than the intervening stages; I had to shift my sense of both duration and process, and think about extending my participation into consumption before I even contemplated production. 

upward expansion and other facets of NYC

As a small child, my parents would occasionally take me through the tunnel from New Jersey, out into NYC for a Broadway show or a family get-together. The hustle and bustle of New York City always overwhelmed me since it differed so much from the quiet little town in which I grew up. Whenever we visited, I would inevitably start to feel trapped by the city and its enormous buildings that seemed to block out all possible light and nature. As we would walk around the city, my parents, who spent many years living in the city, often commented on its small size. I, however, could not envision New York City as anything but huge until I started living in New York and lost the etic perception of the outsider.

One prominent issue that is raised by the paragraph above is the contradictory idea that New York City can at once be viewed as both large and small. The huge quantity of people and the numerous buildings certainly help to give the feel of a large city; however, the idea of largeness exists mainly as the center of etic perceptions of thought, which are streamed through the “sensory overload” that one experiences upon first visiting NYC. An outlook of smallness seems to occur only after such a number of experiences in the city that one no longer views the city as foreign, but can recall memories from individual parts and can, in a sense, claim those parts as their own. In “Material Culture as Text”, Hodder discusses the “emic” verses the “etic’, and explains that the use of space can perhaps act as a bridge between the two viewpoints. In this way of thinking, a scarcity of space in NYC can be recognized when people or institutions attempt to acquire their own personal place to live in the city. Following in the same vein as Albert’s post, obtaining private living spaces in the city can be just as difficult to accomplish as creating private space on the R train.

Another instance of the scarcity of space can be seen in Columbia University’s somewhat controversial expansion to West Harlem. Columbia University has a significantly smaller campus than most of the other universities of a similar size and thus has been crunched for space. Even with the addition of the Harmony Hall undergraduate residence and the new science building, space is still tight. What has always seemed strange to me is the way that Lerner Hall was designed to waste so much space with those huge ramps when space is already so limited. (Article on the CU Manhattanville expansion.)

The last idea that I will bring up about space in NYC is the concept of upward expansion as it relates to archaeology and, thus, the past. The idea of space is central to one's perception of the present and the past. On any archaeological excavation, one strives to locate the specific place in which past generations of humans lived and flourished. This idea of space upward for skyscrapers is strange in that the different levels of occupation all occur in one time period; yet these levels, now orientated upward, seem to exist on the same plane as that of chronological occupation that occurs in archaeology. One would then think that the upward expansion of space seen in New York City would automatically evoke the presence of previous occupation underneath the ground. However, in this case, the skyscrapers do not tend to act as signifiers for the previous expansion, now underground, that occurred upward over time. It seems to me that the lack of nature presented by these skyscrapers causes the archaeological aspect of upward expansion underneath the city to be lost as the signified. Therefore, the upward expansion of NYC creates a disconnect between the city space and the more natural underground environment of the city’s archaeological past.

Camille Hutt

Semiotic Topographies

“What we call ideology only achieves consistency by intervening in social space and its production, and by thus taking on body therein. Ideology per se might well be said to consist primarily in a discourse upon social space (Lefebvre, 1974: 44).”

An almost daily reminder of this discourse is my walk up through Morningside Park to Columbia’s campus. The significance of the park itself has been contested for many years, and I’ve always found the position of the University in relation to the poorer neighborhoods below to be especially striking. The University relocated to its current campus in 1896, joining St. Luke’s Hospital and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. It has often been suggested that gathering such institutions in their locale atop a cliff was meant to recall the Athenian Acropolis. Topographical extremities seem to have been a signifier since the emergence of the first permanent settlements and though the heights no longer serve practical measures as such, they have retained their inherent symbolism as a bastion of relative power and wealth, in this case magnified by the placement of the Park. The characteristics of the topography in this case create the signifier.

The decision to situate a park between one hundred tenth and one hundred twenty-third streets was made at the request of the city's comptroller, who thought that the 'severe topography' of the area would make the extension of the street grid prohibitively expensive. First proposed in 1867, the park was conceived long before the racial and economic divide between Harlem and the Heights. However, Morningside Park has since had the effect of distancing Harlem from the academic community that, geographically, is only blocks away. While this may have aided Harlem in establishing a unique identity as a community, it has also led to a degree of disengagement by the University from the nearby community that has sometimes resulted in hostility.

From the parapet along Morningside Drive, one is able to survey the buildings of Harlem, and beyond them. It is a natural vantage point to gaze upon the urban landscape below. To reach Harlem, one must descend multiple flights of steps and continue walking downhill along a path, only reaching the neighborhood of Harlem itself after passing through an open gate in a cast-iron fence that contrasts sharply with the grandeur of the west entrances. The difference in perspective from above as one passes through the gate is striking. There is no vista now, only the immediate urban environment. Passing through the Park back to Morningside Heights requires a more strenuous walk, as one must wind one's way back up the path and the stairs, confronted by hill, cliff, and wall. If a wrong turn is taken, it will shortly be discovered that not all paths lead directly to the streets above, many instead meandering back down into the park.

An interesting dialogue over this function of the park's location can be observed in the material culture of the park itself. An elegant pond in the park is the remnant of a controversial attempt by Columbia University to build an athletic center in the park in the 1960's. Although the center was to have featured a facility for the use of Harlem residents, it was regarded by the emerging civil rights movement as an attempt at segregation. The administration denied this, stating that the athletic center would benefit both communities. However, student protests in 1968 halted construction of the new building. Whether there was any true racial bias inherent in the plan is not as relevant as is the observable paradigm shift to an active attempt at integration. Interestingly, there is also a statue at the one hundred sixteenth 'Morningside entrance' of Carl Schurz “A Defender of Liberty and a friend of Human Rights.” It is explained that Schurz was an advocate for abolition and was active on behalf of Native Americans at the bureau of Indian affairs.

Pedestrians are able to learn that the area was inhabited by a succession of Native Americans, and Dutch and English settlers. The immediate vicinity can be connected to both the American Revolution and the War of 1812. The attempt by Columbia to build an athletic center is noted and contextualized within the larger civil rights movement as a moment of solidarity between the student body and the population of Harlem. The presence on the Harlem Plain of Native American and Dutch settlements, eventually appropriated by the English settlers is noted in the same perfunctory way as the controversy over the athletic center, on a placard at the Morningside entrance to the park. The statues and friezes that act as a monument to people and ideas attempt to weave a multicultural history into the fabric of the park.

--Stephen