„Vasárnapi ebéd? Ott kell lenned!” (Az étkezés társadalmi jelentősége olasz Harlemben 1920 és 1940 között)
“Sunday dinner? You have to be there!” (The social significance of food in Italian Harlem, 1920–1940)

Summary/Abstract: Many scholars have pointed out that the particular relevance of food habits and food rituals in the Italian American culture is related to the group „familism”. Scholars have mostly interpreted the intimate connection between food culture and family culture among Italian Americans as a legacy of the traditional Southern Italian peasant culture. This paper offers a different opinion, suggesting that the important role of food in family life and in signifying ethnic identity for different generations of Italian Americans is the ultimate result of a process which took place in modern America itself. My analysis of the Italian American community of East Harlem, New York, in the interwar years, shows that the relevance of food habits resulted from the interaction between the family realm and the changing socioeconomic context. The Italian American family emerged therefore less as a place where a minority group could preserve its ethnic traditions against the forces of modernity, than as a place where ethnic „traditions” were created, drawing selectively on and recasting old features and values, as a result of new pressures and needs. The Italian American domesticity that many contemporary observers saw as „traditional” was, in fact, largely an American invention and an important feature of „Americanness”. The essay discusses the way which food came to represent a symbol of ethnicity for Italian Americans in East Harlem and stresses four issues in particular. First, the generational conflict over the continuity of distinctive food habits, largely caused by the influence of a public discourse linking immigrant food to socio-cultural inferiority. Second, the use of collective rituals centered on food consumption as spaces where group ideology was produced. Third, the symbolic and ideological use of food in the strategies immigrants adopted to socialize their children. Fourth, the symbolic use of food habits as a means of differentiation from „non-white” neighboring groups and assertion of the „Americanness” of the group. Food and food rituals played a leading role in the construction of a particular family ideology that functioned as the moral foundation upon which many Italian Americans structured a large part of their ethnic experience and identity. The idealized relevance of the family, with its supposed devotion, solidarity, sense of responsibility, work ethic, but also suspicion for and impermeability to the outside world, not only influenced the „private” organization of generational and gender relations, roles, and identities, but also affected the way in which the immigrants negotiated their place as „Italian Americans” in the public realm.

• Details
• Contents