Werner Enninger
In search of culinary semiotics
An overview of sign oriented studies of culinary action
Adrienne Lehrer
The language of wine tasting.
The development and use of scientific terminologies
Christoph Küper
Wine descriptions as a semantic field.
Problems of their translation
Valerie Heitfeld-White
Pasin long kukim bilong mipela.
"Our way of cooking" in New Guinea
Monica Rector
Eating as a ritual, sign, myth
Brasilian proverbs
Werner Enninger
Culinary behavior as symbolic behavior.
A social semiotic case study of the Amisch
Enclosure
Peter Kubelka
Visual chicken
In search of culinary semiotics
An overview of sign oriented studies of culinary action
Werner Enninger, University of Essen
Summary. Given the absence of studies which explicitly attempt to apply
semiotic models to the description of the culinary domain, this report will
review studies that can be interpreted as sign-oriented. The term
"sign-oriented" will be assigned to all studies which model culinary action
as
a process of semiosis. Such studies attempt to reconstruct the meaning of
semiosis from either the factual culinary action conceived as a sign-carrier or
the linguistic representation of factual culinary action. "Culinary action"
is
defined as meaningful action which is controlled by the perceptual, ethical,
and aesthetic maps of a specific culture a) in the selection of food from
edible material, b) in processing food, and c) in the organization of food
consumption. These criteria restrict this report to studies which have been
undertaken in linguistics, cultural anthropology, and ethnoscience.
The language of wine tasting.
The development and use of scientific terminologies
Adrienne Lehrer, University of Arizona
Summary. Previous experiments which investigated wine descriptions by ordinary
(nonexpert) wine drinkers showed that there was a great deal of individual
variation and little consistency or consensus. The current study investigates
the same topics with wine experts. The subjects in this study were scientists
and advanced graduate students at a famous wine research institute. Results
showed that on most tasks, the experts performed better (that is, showed great
consensus among themselves) than the nonexperts, but their performance was
particulary good on the kinds of wines with which they had had the most
experience. The descriptions as well as the evaluations by the experts were
influenced by preferences, just as was the case with the nonexperts. Finally,
this study discusses the problems involved in creating an observationally
adequate vocabulary in emerging sciences, along with the problems for assuring
that all practitioners in the science use that vocabulary consensually.
Wine descriptions as a semantic field.
Problems of their translation
Christoph Küper, Technical University Berlin
Summary. In translating a semantic field one has to take account not only of
the referential aspect of its elements but also of their paradigmatic position.
The translation has to deal with two different, non-isomorphic semantic systems
(the semantic fields in either language) and has to provide for one of them an
equivalent system of equal size and equal internal structure within the other
language.
The semantic field of wine-descriptors is characterized by the fact that its
expressions refer neither to "natural" things nor to "artificial"
ones
(artifacts); they have to do with perceptual properties. This fact seems to put
constraints on the sort of expressions that are possible in this field. While
the number of genuine field-structured expressions (i.e. lexicalized
expressions referring to olfactory and gustatory aspects of wine) is
comparatively small, a large number of field-external expressions have been
introduced into and made part of the field. These expressions include
metaphors, adjectives derived from concrete nouns, and expressions taken from a
different terminological framework.
Pasin long kukim bilong mipela.
"Our way of cooking" in New Guinea
Valerie Heitfeld-White, University of Essen
Summary. The title of this study indicates its theme: the importance of
ethnological/cultural dimensions in semantic studies. Dictionary entries cannot
replace the first-hand observation of what words mean to the native speaker
within the framework of daily communication in his own society. This theme is
elaborated in the field of cooking verbs in New Guinea Pidgin, in relation to
the cooking verb universals tentatively formulated by Lehrer (1974).
Eating as a ritual, sign, myth
Brasilian proverbs
Monica Rector, Pontificia Universidade Catolica, Rio de Janeiro
Summary. When the hunger instinct is organized by social rules, food becomes a
dish and eating becomes dining. Since rules organizing the hunger instinct
normally function unconsciously, they are structurally connected with rules
unconsciously determining other instincts. Social rules make dining a ritual
that gives the dishes eaten a contextual meaning backed by myths. In many myths
analogies are drawn between the structure of a meal and the structure of the
social group eating it. This is exemplified by the feast of the Holy Virgin of
Nazaré. Analogies between food taboos and sexual taboos are illustrated by
Brazilian proverbs.
Culinary behavior as symbolic behavior.
A social semiotic case study of the Amisch
Werner Enninger, University of Essen - Polytechnic
Summary. The subject of investigation is the culinary behavior of the Old Order
Amish (O.O.A.), an ethnic minority in the US. The goal of this study is to
model the overt behavior of a specific O.O.A. community in procuring,
processing and consuming food as sign-carriers of sign processes and thus to
understand culinary behavior as meaningful social action. Parts of the arsenal
of culinary actions, their syntactical arrangements and pragmatic constraints,
it is argued, constitute a signal space whose semantic space lies on the
dimensions of social relationship. It is postulated that that part of culinary
actions in which a signal plane can be matched with a semantic plane has the
status of a code. The actions of food procuring encode part of the
group-internal and part of the group-transcending interaction networks. The
actions of food-processing and consumption encode part of the culture's
internal social organization, such as membership classification,
stratification, role-distribution, and prestige ranks. While the group's verbal
repertoire has primarily a referential function, the culinary code is part of
those "nonverbal" repertoires which are primarily functional in signifying
and
communicating social relationships.
