1First of all, I would like to begin with some of Lotman’s ideas and some assumptions pertaining to the semiotics of culture in general. To stand out with respect to sociology or anthropology when dealing with practices, a distinction must be made between practices and texts or signs that allow societies to express and organize themselves. Whereas sociology and anthropology deal with practices, the semiotic methodological framework favours starting from texts to arrive at culture. This textualist approach, however, leads to two exclusions: 1. the exclusion of culture as a set of ideal mental representations; 2. the exclusion of culture as experience in action. In contrast, what is cultural is what can be transformed into standardized and socially shared schemes. Experience thus becomes material for a semiotics of culture when it shows a memorable, communicative and intersubjective dimension.
- 1 The first who considered dishes as objects of semiotic studies were, to name but a few, Roland Bart (...)
2Hence, in spite of the importance, in its approaches, or even the priority of the context, according to Lotman (1980), the meaning of an issue is determined in the constructive tension between the internal textual structure and the external cultural structures. That is, instead of seeking the explanation of the texts in those contexts, Lotman attempts to reconstruct larger anthropological models from fine analyzes; the major cultural models can, therefore, be reconstructed from texts. The notion of text is understood broadly; it designates any semiotic configuration (verbal, architectural, culinary, etc.) governed by grammatical, semantic and pragmatic or circumstantial rules. Dishes, in this sense, are considered as texts carrying an ideology and as supported by other texts of the semiosphere which echo them according to the principle of isomorphism developed by Lotman (Ibid.). The culinary can, in such a perspective, be approached as an object of study.1
- 2 Culinary interculturalism first arose in travelogues where the theme of the other’s eating was cons (...)
3The context of my interest in intercultural cooking is to be situated in a series of researches, which I have been conducting for six years, about what I called culinary interculturalism,2 which can be understood either as the study of the reactions of travelers to a culinary phenomenon, or as the study of dishes and their modelling power in different cultures, which is the subject of this communication. By “modelling power”, I mean the capacity of signs to convey values, ideologies and, in a certain way, to influence behaviour. The food and dishes we consume, like the language we speak, the clothes we wear or the places we visit, in addition to their immediate function, are texts through which we give meaning to our life and existence; they play an important role in shaping and structuring our identity and at the same time our otherness. That is to say, they are the signs that we construct; yet, in a certain sense, they construct us.
- 3 Let us recall here the famous article about blue jeans intitled “Lumbar thought”, especially this p (...)
4More specifically—as we have learnt from Barthes (1957), Greimas (1970), Eco (1983)3 and Marrone (2011)—a dish is the actualisation of a recipe. It is built on implicit knowledge and on a taste regime. This taste regime expresses a specific way of managing the ingredients, of preserving or modifying them in order to propose others according to the political will of who directs the recipe and according to the reading pact (Marrone 2020) established with the recipient of the dish. In the simple presentation of the dish, that is to say, in its enunciation, there is the exhibition of an original form that, like any didactic text, aims to convey a certain use of the truth.
5By ostentatiously exhibiting a specific syntax, semantics and pragmatics, the dish builds a certain enunciative authority: the potage must be eaten like this and the harira like that. We will read such prescriptions and proscriptions as the expression of a political regime of taste specific to those famous dishes; more specifically, we will question its management of differences and identities in order to determine how a dish deals with differences and what political vision they underpin. The minute analysis of the dishes allows us to go back to broader cultural models and broader contexts that constitute a relevant critical metalanguage. I am simply recalling, following Lotman, that “between the cultural universe and the singular text, which is realized in a system of culture properly as a text, there is an isomorphic relationship” (Lotman 1980, p. 3, my/our translation). Determining the logic of a dish by linking it to determined contexts makes it possible to describe its features and function, to the extent that the two reflect each other, because they obey a specific logic. But this comes up against the objection regarding the context, which, according to the proponents of a strictly structuralist conception of immanence, is an extra-semiotic reality.
6This is where the recourse to the notion of encyclopedia (Eco 1975), close in many respects to the notion of semiosphere but much more theorized and elaborated, allows us to use it as an interpretative hypothesis that makes it possible to determine the “ideology” (cf. Stano 2023) of a dish by linking it to corollary contexts; the latter certainly are outside the text, because they refer to logics, categories and notions that are cultural and social, not intrinsically textual. But this insertion is completely cultural and semiotic; it signifies that it has nothing to do with referential situations and that, having an interpretative nature, it is mobile and negotiable: the encyclopedic extra-textual is structured each time in a different way, according to the relevance adopted and the interpretative situation. Like the nuance made by Lorusso (2010, p. 172), text and context do not present differences in nature, but in relevance.
7In this sense, the principle of immanence goes beyond its initial scope. It no longer serves as a procedural choice, at the start of an analysis to delimit its own object, separating a level of stability with respect to a series of variables, but becomes the postulate and criterion of any semiotic analysis, since in the encyclopedia, or in the semiosphere, there is no metalanguage, everything can be used as a metalanguage, as an explanatory category for something else. In other words, and as stated by two of the exegetes of Eco’s thought:
Se il principio di immanenza, che ha costituito per anni la specificità stessa dell’approcio semiotici rispetto ad altri approcci di tipo sociologico, critiqueo e philosophical, è ancora salvaguardabile oggi, lo è forse spostando l’immanenza dell’analisi dal livello del testo a quello dell’enciclopedia. Questo non vuol dire però dissolvere la metodologia semiotica in una sociologia della cultura, bensi significa fondare la metodologia semiotica stessa sulle logiche costitutive dei macanismi della semiosfera (Paolucci & Violi 2007, p. 9). [If the principle of immanence, which for years constituted the very specificity of the semiotic approach compared to other approaches of a sociological, critical or philosophical type, can still be safeguarded today, it is perhaps by moving the immanence of the analysis from the text level to that of the encyclopedia. However, this does not mean dissolving the semiotic methodology into a sociology of culture, but rather means founding the semiotic methodology itself on the constitutive logics of the mechanisms of the semiosphere, my translation]
8It will, however, be necessary to specify that the problem of the systematicity of the logics of culture does not arise, because they are attested by the linguistic use and its norms. The latter carry values that society authorizes and even encourages. This opens the way to semiotic dimensions subject to analysis of the forms of valorization at play, of the axiological force of the treatment of individualities, of its identity force and its ability to sign logics of inclusion and exclusion that delimit groups of belonging and exclusion, a particular way of conceiving of evil and good or of the general interest.
9Such issues will be treated here through two dishes, harira and potage, typical of two countries: Morocco and France, respectively. Both of them are famous and greatly present on the table. These two dishes are made in two differing manners. Moreover, they present two opposite ways of dealing with different ingredients and with alterity or identity in general.
10The purpose of this contribution is to compare two types of soup famous in two foreign countries and to ask whether their success is not due, in addition to their taste quality, to the fact that they refer to two political regimes. The choice is arbitrary and does not claim any relevance. On the other hand, the connection between food and political regimes does not mean that there is a causal relationship between the two; things are much more nuanced than that, as we will show during the analysis.
11French soup, which is a sophisticated and evolved version of the primitive broth, originally prepared with herbs, vegetables or bones or whatever, becomes refined from the 17th century onwards. In L’Art du bien manger [The Art of Eating Well] by Edmond Richardin (1913), soup comes in multiple configurations and uses one or various ingredients: pike soup, fish in general, with eels, apricots, red beans. In Le Cuisinier européen [The European Cook], Jules Berteuil (1860) lists other soup recipes: beer, milk, bean soup, etc. Other famous recipes limit the soup to one ingredient or two but never more—it is a question of classification and syntax. Some go further as to refine the syntaxic rules, adding a pragmatic criterion to them by talking about seasonal soups; each season should have its own one.
12But the soup that interests us here and which also takes the name of soupe or mouliné or velouté is one where there are several elements at the beginning of the recipe. In this kind of soup, there is no cooking order, all the ingredients are cooked together. They are all, so to speak, on an equal footing and are introduced freely from the start into the pot.
13But the composition must imperatively follow, so to speak, a “double articulation”, before reaching the final sentence or the final text. In the first articulation, the ingredients, however different they may be, are cooked together. Then comes the second crucial operation—because the success of the dish is at stake, we will see that later—where all those ingredients are called to disappear, that is to say, to put aside their initial shapes, their morphological peculiarities and their differences under the benevolent eye of the sieve or of the mechanical reel replaced today by the high-tech assimilator mixer.
Figure 1.
A French soup in the form of a “velouté”.
- 4 Ramadan is the month of fasting from the break of daylight till the sunset. The breaking of the fas (...)
14Harira, like its French equivalent, is also linked to winter and to the cold, though it is particularly associated with Ramadan4 (the month of fasting), even when the latter arrives in the middle of summer. It is, therefore, connected not only to winter, but also to spring, summer or autumn, depending on the decisive influence of the lunar calendar. Vegetables are important in this dish, but perhaps not as much as in French potage, because other ingredients belonging to other categories have their place: chickpeas, beans, lentils, vermicelli and pieces of fat or meat. Here, the canonical order of cooking requires putting the hardest ingredients first: chickpeas, beans and lentils, mashed potatoes or flour later, vermicelli and tomato juice at the end. Once everything is cooked, the soup is served with all the elements, just like it started out, so all the elements must be visible in the bowl. Visibility is a matter of the utmost importance here.
15Here, the syntaxic structure is heterogeneous from beginning to end. It is a somewhat homogeneous structure, but it is at the same time heterogeneous: the broth as the main unifying matrix of several other matrices, both subordinate and principal.
16The final structure of the harira must offer both radically opposed visual modes, a fluid and smooth mode represented here by the structure of the broth or the juice, and another one that is discontinuous and in relief, almost fractal, represented by the ingredients that float, each of them on their own, on the smooth surface.
Figure 2.
Moroccan harira.
17Harira should not be only hot, but burning, whatever the season. It is therefore a motley content with different forms, the vegetables first reduced to a mash in which they cannot be distinguished like in French potage, but with the remainder being distinguishable and offering a variety of disconcerting textures for uninformed palates: in addition to the broth, there is, in decreasing order of resistance, beans, lentils, chickpeas and vermicelli.
18The reception of this harira is singular, namely, no spoonful taken by the eater of the harira resembles the other; each spoonful represents a minimal unit of signification and has a semantic configuration which is unique to it. Each spoonful requires and imposes an original decryption of taste.
19The harira eater is still consuming the same bowl, but no spoonful looks like the other. It is this variable identity which mostly draws our interest, not only because it postulates an eater, so to speak, curious to find out new interpretations, but also because it ends up cultivating a certain taste or sense for the random or the impromptu through a process of adaptation: in short, an insomniac eater or reader (cf. Eco 1990).
20French potage is exclusively linked to winter and cold; it is also linked to mountains, with crouton or cheese soup; it must be relatively hot but not too hot—unlike with the harira, there is a limit, a modus even when it comes to being warmed up. It is a liquid that we could taste and guess its constituents and various elements having all melted under the mold, as the assimilator model provides for. Sometimes, we can still notice some of these components, but this would be a sign of an imperfect and unsuccessful soup, as there are yet some resistant elements that fail to be harmoniously mixed with others, that is to say, a soup that involves lumps. The lumps here indicate a vice; a perfect potage should not contain lumps, or any trace of any “individuality”, however insignificant or minimal may it be.
21The perfect soup, therefore, postulates a particular model eater, a quiet and serene one as seen from a certain angle; yet, from another perspective, one can also say that it postulates a passive and almost mechanical eater, basing all his/her trust on the assimilator model of the perfect potage which guarantees it to be a soup without lumps, without surprises, a perfect identity, one that is reassuring but at the same time, as one may put it, cretinizing.
22But there is more. The dishes not only form a model eater through the texture, through the preservation of the particularities of each constitutive element. They also convey their own values. They have their way of speaking and of expressing programs and counter-programs, histories and value systems, in short, rhetoric and ideology.
23The French potage upholds a model of total integration of elements in the name of a certain homogeneous conception of texture and culinary matter; it is irrevocable in the face of resisting elements or strong individualities, because the latter must simply disappear to achieve the ideal of smooth and uniform velvety texture. A soup with lumps is a velouté to redo or to throw away, it is a spoiled one.
24We find the same intransigence and the same firmness in the case of Moroccan harira, but in the opposite direction, which must ensure the particularities and specificities of each of the elements used. This care is taken from the start since the order of introduction of the elements respects their elemental texture, with the hard elements at the beginning and the others following in descending order. The goal is to respect the differences of the elements and to maintain them even after they have been cooked. But this respect for difference does not neglect a crucial unifying element: the juice that must be abundant to contain the elements. It is a question of balance, which is of the utmost importance for a successful harira. If the juice is not abundant enough to contain the elements, the dish is spoilt: the dictionary of Darija uses the word qasseha, that is to say, a strong or thick harira. If the juice overwhelms the different elements to the point of drowning them or corrupting their visibility, the same dictionary is also final: it uses the word jaria, that is to say, a liquid and inconsistent or even bland dish.
25We will try to link this attitude towards the ingredients and towards differences, in the French potage and in the Moroccan harira, respectively to the French republican regime and to the Moroccan monarchical model or to the Arab-Muslim one in general. We will do this by relying on the principle of isomorphism (Lotman 1980) and on that of the logic of culture (Eco 1975). Dishes, like the language we speak, the clothes we wear and other signs belonging to other semiotic systems, are governed by principles of coherence and opposition offering a model of high semiotic and logical relevance. What are the specificities of these two political models? This will be at issue in what follows.
- 5 Integration refers to the French assimilationist model, which consists of adding new elements to al (...)
26In the case of the French potage, we can see, in the concern for homogeneity and assimilation under the aegis of a sovereign and unifying principle, the trace of the French republican model, the equalitarian one (“Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité”). All members are equal and receive the same treatment; they must all forget their original form and let themselves be assimilated into the circle within which they wish to be integrated. They must therefore renounce their own formal peculiarities, sacrifice themselves for the ultimate goal, the soup. Elsewhere, it is called the Nation, the Republic or the Civil Society.5
27But if we want to investigate this hypothesis more deeply and go even further back along the chain of sources of this model of soup, we can link this aspect, that both advocates and justifies sacrifice, to another model, which has long structured French society and to a certain extent Western society, namely the model of theodicy.
- 6 Consider, for instance, Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions, where he presents the questioning of evil (...)
- 7 According to Leibniz, God always acts for the best because “God is an absolutely perfect being” (Le (...)
28Let us recall, in passing, that for a long time, the meandering question of evil as a source of good deeply preoccupied the Christian doctors6, especially when they found themselves obliged to explain such a terrible and terrifying book as the Apocalypse. The furori sacrum posed the problem of evil coming from God and its justification. God’s intention, however, was not to do evil, for the simple and unique reason that it is He who created both good and evil and He that controls the latter. This evil, called so “very human”, is therefore a good. It hides a sublime goal, that of redeeming humanity and allowing its salvation. This is how we came up with the concept of theodicy to justify this paradox.7 Such theodicy was very inspiring for many secular reworkings (Leibniz 1710) in monarchical and republican circles in the form of reason of state, community interest, etc.
29From this perspective, the violence of the mixing, the negation of the peculiarities of each of the ingredients, and the reduction of the differences are operations which aim at a noble goal, to reduce the peculiarities, to crush them well to obtain the ideal broth or potage.
- 8 See, for example: Kotîba Ibn (1970) [880]; Baghdâdî Al (1948) [1037]; Khaldoune Ibn (1999); Waterbu (...)
30With regard to harira, we can see within this identity in alterity the reflection of the patriarchal or monarchical model which acknowledges the differences, and even cultivates them in order to reign. Unlike the model of republican power, the model of caliphal or monarchical8 power uses the strategy of recognizing the diversities, even exacerbating them in order to sustain their containment within the same and unique mold.
31All elements are not created equal at the start of the cooking, but are equal when cooked. Recognizing the peculiarities of each ingredient, even saving them is what makes this dish so specific. A harira that offers ingredients that are overcooked or melted, that is to say, where individualities have been dissipated, is a failed one.
32Harira offers us a particular and a priori contradictory model of identity and otherness: there is certainly a diversity, that of a dish with a broth containing very diverse elements, but at the same time, there is an identity owing to the very fact that this diversity is maintained and respected. It’s not contradictory, it’s just paradoxical. It is this very paradox that characterizes the relationship between community and individuality in Morocco (Bernoussi 2018) or in the Arabo-Muslim world in general.
33Let us take for this an example that has been repeatedly analyzed by anthropologists and sociologists. Joining several brotherhoods at the same time is in no way contradictory for a Moroccan. The brotherhoods are loosely organized and hierarchical; there are no constraints, secrets, initiation rites, tests, etc. This does not mean that there are no rules to be observed, nor some unspoken hierarchy; there are, but they remain vague and endowed with a disconcerting flexibility.
34This is because Moroccan society, like Middle Eastern society, is mindful of community, but manages it successfully by making it more individual. This is an approach that may appear contradictory. Let us cite one of those anthropologists, Clifford Geertz, who explains as follows:
Middle Eastern society, and Moroccan society as a frontier variant […] copes with diversity by distinguishing with elaborate precision the contexts (marriage, diet, worship, education) within which men are separated by their dissimilitude and those (work, friendship, politics, trade) where, however warily and however conditionally, men are connected by their differences (Geertz 1979, p. 141).
35This reminds us, if we want to investigate in further detail this question of identity in the diversity of the Moroccan harira, of the strategy of Islam in the management of otherness and difference and the secret of its success since its appearance.
36Islam has adopted a subtle and strategic attitude towards other religions, insofar as, while openly drawing inspiration from Judeo-Christian traditions, recognizing these traditions, it has imposed itself strictly and unconditionally, not only as the final religion, Muhammad being the seal of the prophets, but as a single religion. In this subtle attitude, Islam did not openly declare itself as the enemy of the other two religions, it did not seek to assimilate or confront them; on the contrary, it recognized them while retaining the power and the right to amend some of their ideas or conceptions, the goal being not to assimilate, but to keep the differences in order to be able to contain them, even to make those differences into a motive for rule. Edward Said, in the context of the notion of “Orientalism”, explains with brillo this strategy of exacerbating difference in order to rule when he states:
Doubtless Islam was a real provocation in many ways. It lay uneasily close to Christianity, geographically and culturally. It drew on the Judeo-Hellenic traditions, it borrowed creatively from Christianity, it could boast of unrivaled military and political successes (Said 1978, new ed. 1979, p. 74).
37We started in this contribution from the study of two dishes famous in two foreign countries to confront them then with two political regimes. What encouraged us to investigate such correspondences is the fact that regimes of taste like political regimes have in common constraint, compromise, and even in some cases renunciation and fusion.
38Each of these texts, both the culinary recipe or the dish and the political or religious texts, translate the same global motif, that of the sacrifice of individualities or their exacerbation for a common good. The aim was to show how each of the two cultures, to which the dishes and the political and religious texts belong, work and follow their own logic, that of the culture. It may be objected that in the case of the French soup, there is a counter-example, that of pesto soup, amply analyzed in the past by Greimas (1970). But we forget in this specific case that pesto soup is neither French nor Republican, but Provençal.
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