Immigrants in their homeland

Immigrants in their homeland

Reinterpretations of food Symbols: Palestinians and the Israeli Appropriation and "De-Ethnicitization" of Humus

Food is a highly semiotic device; it can signal a cornucopia of social signs (Appadurai, 1994). In this paper I argue that in the age of Globalization and within the confinement of national cultural industries ethnic groups and individuals often experience various "immigration" corollaries in their historical homelands without the actual translocation when food practices and food images are concerned. Scholars have already drawn a distinction between the habitual, daily, lived practices shared among group of people, as one form of a shared identity and those explicit self conscious symbolic and performative displays that are often given the public label 'national culture' (Bourdieu, 1984, Wilk 2002). In the case at hand I look at the changing images of Humus, a local ethnic Palestinian food in the general public as a way to explore how an indigenous ethnic group is stripped of its cultural gastronomic asset within the larger national culture. In the case at hand Humus is being appropriated by agencies of the dominant culture and integrated into the national diet and through this process its "heritage" is appropriated and obscured for the 'common national good'. I argue that the consumption of this food and its origin by the Jewish dominant group does not only expropriate local Palestinians of their gastronomic history but rather transforms them for all practical purposes into exiles in their homeland. This mélange of images regarding one specific nationalized and de-ethnicized (Belasco, 1987) food item facilitates further understanding into the cultural exclusion of a local minority group from the national culinary scene. It tells a story of a forced migration, indeed immigration, from the local landscape simply by the latter cultural appropriation by the dominant national majority.