Feasting in Southeast Asia

Feasting emerges from the pages of this book as far more than gustatory and social diversions from daily work routines. Instead, feasting in tribal societies plays a critical role in village social, political, and economic dynamics. Alliances are brokered by feasts, debts created, political battles waged, and large amounts of food are produced. A main argument of the book is that feasting has been one of the most important forces in creating cultural changes since the end of the Paleolithic. Enormous pressures are created by feasts and their promoters to increase food and prestige item production to achieve social and political goals. The domestication of plants and animals probably resulted from such feasting pressures. This volume documents the dynamics of traditional feasting and the ways in which the bewildering array of feasts benefits hosts. It argues that people’s abilities to marry, reproduce, defend themselves against threats and attacks, and to defend their interests in village politics all depend on their ability to engage in feasting networks. As such feasting in these societies has important survival and fitness consequences. To be excluded from feasting networks means to be subject to attack from social predators, in some cases leading to enslavement.