Migration, food traditions and ethnic tourism
To understand how food knowledge in migrant societies is maintained and transformed, it is necessary to go back to where food knowledge is learned: children learn about food when they first come into contact with the flavours and textures of the food eaten by the members of the group to which they belong. “Although taste remains something distinctive and individual, it is imprinted from birth with the stamp of a culture” [
1]. Children learn the norms and conventions of their society about what is edible, which foods are taboo and when a certain type of food should be eaten. These eating habits are deeply rooted in the value system of the individual and people find it difficult to fundamentally transform their eating habits and only do so very slowly [
2]. Therefore, migrants attempt to preserve their eating habits and maintain their food traditions for a considerable time [
3].
Derived from the Latin word ‘tradere’, tradition refers to everything that is transmitted from the past to the present [
4]. Through traditions, people attempt ‘to establish continuity with a suitable historic past’ [
5]. Traditions are not static, but are constantly imbued ‘with dynamic content and interpretation’, being a ‘conscious model of past lifeways that people use in the construction of their identity’
1 [
6]. Through traditions—including food traditions—migrants connect with their collective past and establish a link with their ancestors’ homeland [
3]. Thus, the term ‘traditional food’ describes an emic perspective of the migrants on their food [
7]. The consumption of traditional food strengthens the social coherence of the migration group, and at the same time distinguishes the migrants from the rest of society in the host country [
8].
The maintenance of the migrants’ own traditions not only has an effect on individual migrants and the migrant community, but on the host country as well. Yang and Wall [
9] note that some host countries ‘take advantage of their cultural diversity and employ ethnic tourism to stimulate local economic development’. This is happening in the Brazilian state of Santa Catarina, for example, where European immigrants, including Germans, Italians and Austrians, have settled. In ethnic tourism, culture is commoditised, while the ‘most marketable forms of cultural exoticism are the more spectacular aspects of the lifestyles and artefacts of minority groups’ [
9] such as dance, music, architecture, art and food. In Treze Tílias, the Austrian settlement in Santa Catarina, the local development plan stipulates the strengthening of certain cultural aspects for the purposes of tourism, making it an active part of local politics [
10].
When tourists visit locations in which ethnic tourism has been established on the basis of the migrants’ traditions and culture, they can have ‘exotic’ and unfamiliar experiences within their own country. Experiences during visits to such locations can differ considerably from those gained during visits to the migrants’ country of origin, including the culinary experience they have. The range of ethnic food
2 served in ethnic restaurants is usually limited to a selection of ‘iconic dishes’ in a national culinary repertoire, which is not always representative of the wide range of food in local eating places in the migrants’ country of origin [
11]. Bak [
12] expresses this process as ‘a form of standardization (homogenization)’ that ‘occurs when a cuisine is introduced to other cultures as ethnic food’. [
12].
Even though food is an important tourist attraction [
13,
14], Cohen and Avieli [
11] remark that ethnic food can become an impediment for tourists due to the different tastes and ingredients, hygiene levels or food taboos. Therefore, food in tourist locations often ‘becomes acceptable only if it is to some extent transformed’ [
11]. To be commercially viable, restaurant owners need to be aware of their potential customers’ tastes and their prior exposure to different foodway systems. ‘The anticipated clientele, then, is a major factor in the negotiation of edibility and exoticness, and ethnic restaurants must frequently emphasize the edibility of the exotic in order to attract non-native customers’ [
15]. According to Long [
15], menus in ethnic restaurants are negotiated by restaurant owners using five basic strategies: framing the culinary experience, naming or translating dishes, explicating, selecting the menu and adapting recipes.
Most studies on food and tourism focus on the tourist experience. Among the few studies that focus on the influence of tourism on the host country cuisine are studies in Taiwan [
16], France [
17], England [
18], Vietnam [
19,
20] and Portugal [
21]. Specific ethnic food and food practices can be given a higher status due to tourism [
16‐
18,
20]. While food that is significantly altered to suit the taste of tourists can be rejected by the host community, the introduction of ‘authentic’ food in the menus of tourism-oriented restaurants can result in these dishes being given a higher status [
19]. Tourism ‘can be an agent of both preservation and disfigurement’ of foodstuffs and foodways, as stated by Texeira [
21]. For example in Vietnam, tourism has triggered structural societal changes in some areas, affecting the food knowledge tradition to the extent that cultural food knowledge is lost [
20].
This study focused on the impact of ethnic tourism on the host food knowledge tradition. The term ‘knowledge’ as it is used here refers to Barth’s definition of knowledge as ‘what a person employs to interpret and act on the world’. Within the term he includes ‘feelings (attitudes) as well as information, embodied skills as well as verbal taxonomies and concepts: all the ways of understanding that we use to make up our experienced, grasped reality’ [
22].
To emphasise the focus on cultural consensus, and therefore on the shared aspects of knowledge, the term ‘cultural knowledge’ is used. Knowledge about Tyrolean food in Treze Tílias is cultural because it is shared, but also because it distinguishes the Tyrolean migrants from other Brazilians. Furthermore, people in Treze Tílias make use of this knowledge to promote Tyrolean culture and sell specific dishes as cultural attractions to tourists. ‘Cultural knowledge’ does not imply that all members of the group have the same knowledge: ‘Not everything has to be shared for a ‘culture’ to exist. Only enough has to be shared for a people to recognize itself as a cultural community of a certain kind and for members of that community to be able to recognize each other as recipients and custodians of some imagined tradition of meaning and value’ [
23].
In the method design and description of results, reference is again made to Barth [
22]. According to his framework for analysing knowledge, the following three facets or aspects of traditions of knowledge should be differentiated and discussed: (1) the ‘corpus of substantive assertions and ideas about the world’, (2) the medium that communicates the knowledge—such as words, symbols or actions and (3) the instituted social relations building the framework for the transmission of knowledge [
22].
In line with Barth’s suggestions, three aspects of the food knowledge tradition are presented and discussed in this paper: (1) the content of cultural food knowledge, comprising knowledge of the dishes perceived as Tyrolean food. Here, we make use of cultural domain analysis to find out how people interpret the content of the knowledge domain Tyrolean food [
24]. (2) The media
3 through which knowledge is communicated in Treze Tílias, with the focus on dishes in ethnic restaurants in Treze Tílias, and (3) the distribution of knowledge: How are the different media embedded in social relations? And what consequences do these relations have on the transmission of food knowledge and the cultural food knowledge of the group? Changes in food knowledge are then discussed, taking into account historical developments in Treze Tílias.
Although the contents of cultural food knowledge are mentioned, no attempt was made to trace actual changes in particular food habits or the contents of food knowledge from the time of migration to the present day. The focus here was on the transmission of food knowledge and how food knowledge transmission is socially organised in order to understand the mechanisms in the transformation of cultural food knowledge.