To Be or Not To Be

A little kingdom I possess,
Where thoughts and feelings dwell;
And very hard the task I find
Of governing it well.
~ Louisa May Alcott

...that more or less describes my situation!

~A Wise Man Said~

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
~ Aristotle
Wednesday, June 24, 2020
 
Carrying on the cultural conversation struck in my last post...

My Chinese housemate offered me a taste of a new dish. I tried it and it literally stung my tongue. I couldn't enjoy it. It reminded me of Wasabi flavoured something I had had in Mumbai and how it irritated my taste buds in a serious way. I asked my housemate about the ingredient that was creating havoc with my tongue. She was firstly quite taken aback that I found it "spicy" (I couldn't give a better word for the taste) and more so because she finds my dishes too spicy. Apparently this wasn't spicy at all for her whereas the dishes I make with all the chillies are overly spicy for her! She read out the names on the ingredient list at my request but most that she could translate into English seemed quite ordinary; among others such as "sea weed" I couldn't tell what could be giving the specific flavour I was finding too strong for my taste. It had to be something I wasn't used to. I told my housemate that the fact that she found my dish too spicy and I found hers was due to difference in cultural tastes. To which she responded to the effect of taste being a matter of the body, not culture.
I guess we usually even if subconsciously think of culture as something out there that can be observed or something in here in the mind. It's only after deeply engaging with certain sociological literature on culture that I have come to have a deeper appreciation of the "embodied" nature of culture. The fact that what I find appealingly spicy is too spicy for someone else’s comfort and what someone else finds delicious is too fiery for my taste is our bodily cultural reaction so to speak...or to put it in a different way, cultural habituation of the body. It is intriguing to think about the many different ways in which such habituations might manifest… and be taken for granted just as I take my spicy for granted as the normal spicy…until I encounter someone who tells me otherwise. Even then this information is only theoretical information to me; I have no way of practically understanding her exact experience.

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 4:01 am 0 comments
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