Eating, swimming, walking, and playing: picnic at Ginasio Santa Catarina (1906-1918).
Approaches and looksSince 2001, the Brazilian "Guidelines for the Nutrition Course" (Diretrizes para o Curso de Nutricao) have pointed to the need for a generalist, humanist and critical education. Its curriculum brings topics of Biological and Health Sciences, which do not only include the Human and Social Sciences (HSS), including Anthropology, Philosophy, and Sociology, (1) which implies the very dynamics of the scientific field of Food and Nutrition.
According to Bourdieu, (2) the "scientific field" is the symbolic space in which takes place the social system consisting of relations of force and monopolies, struggles and strategies, interests and profits that condition the discourses of the agents of the field in research/study. In the field, one has the exercise of authority, with an authority given to a certain agent. (2)
Taking into account such dynamics, coupled with a perspective that seeks to deepen the HSS contributions, we have above all the scientific production of its two unique research groups with the Nutrition Evaluation Area of CAPES [Coordenacao de Aperfeicoamento de Pessoal de Nivel Superior (Brazilian Coordination of Improvement of Higher Education Personnel) (a)]. Although there is a relative contribution through HSS, the path started is still incipient in the view of the primacy of the biomedical logic that guides studies and research. (3-6)
According to Nunes, (7) the (western) biomedical rationality and its practices are directed towards: a) Combating diseases through treatment and prevention; b) Acting from the biological definition of diseases; c) Optimism for successful eradication of diseases; and d) Teaching a biomedical knowledge from the biological assumptions of a Natural Science.
As analyzed by Vasconcelos, there is a predominance of research in the postgraduation courses in Nutrition between 2003 and 2012 of quantitative studies--about 90%.8 In this way, there is still an arduous journey so that knowledge and practices from the HSS can be legitimized with the issues surrounding the field of Food and Nutrition.
Given this set of arguments, we propose some displacements here. Studies on food in the area of Natural Sciences focus on the obvious and evident object of, "food," and they are little concerned with dealing with the one that incorporates the culturally elaborated and socially permitted product: the body of the one who eats.
In this sense, a search for a dialogue between Anthropology and History is developed here to read relationships that involve body, food, leisure and playing in the context of the development of the Brazilian city of Florianopolis. The Brazilian Island of Santa Catarina, this "little piece of land lost in the sea [...]," is the scenario that involves interdependent relations, not of opposition, in the contact between environmental natures (environment--flora, fauna, rivers, seas and lakes) and urbanity (the city) to build and develop an analysis on the object "picnic." (9)
In this case, the locus of this investigation is Brazilian school Colegio Catarinense, a high school for the Brazilian state Santa Catarina elites led by German priests who, over more than a century of existence, has changed its name a few times. From the foundation until 1917, Ginasio Santa Catarina; from 1918 until 1942, Ginasio Catarinense. And from this date to the present day the institution has its current name, Colegio Catarinense. (10,12)
Thus, a picnic is constructed in an interdisciplinary way, guided "by the fidelity to the object of study and not to the way of approaching the object." (13) A cultural production located in history that involves the act of eating, physical exercises called at the time "walks" or "marches," sea baths and playing--in short, a historiography on the emergence of new economies of passions that affected bodies on the island in Santa Catarina.
In this sense, the act of eating is another element, together with playing, bathing and exercising, which, together, evidence the production of a practice that involves emotion and sensitivity. Picnic is seen as the "exteriority of the accident" which evidences a "provenance [which] concerns the body," that is to say, "the body: the surface of inscription of events." (14)
Is it possible to think of a type of cultural practice that includes extending the conditions of production of the excitement/emotion of this body that eats at a picnic? How is the eating act articulated in this production? And how does such production relate to the conjuncture of the city? In dealing with a history of sensitivities, questioning "leisure" and the "civilizing process" is necessary.
Aspects of leisure from the civilizing process
"Leisure," a polysemic word, is read here as a pastime in the perspective addressed by Elias and Dunning in the book Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process, which, in general, refers to the idea that in modern society there are several forms of leisure that cause "controlled but pleasant emotional excitement." (15) This leads to "two contradictory functions" for, on the one hand, there is "the pleasure of unleashing human feelings," a "pleasant excitement," and on the other there is "the conservation of a set of surveillance devices to maintain pleasant uncontrolled emotions under control" (p. 80). (15)
The ideas developed about leisure refer to the unfolding of the questions of the "civilizing process," which Elias develops on changes of the sensitivities and type of control that are reflected in levels of pacification in the course of time in a given society. They are different types of emotions, daily and as a pastime, which should be read less as a cathartic condition of release of emotions and more as inserted in the "civilizing process" itself through the duty to be of the norms that lead to the type of training and, thus, evidence a self-control of the emotions in the social personality that is developed. (16,17)
In the theory of the "civilizing process," Elias develops a synthetic and interdependent thought between human beings and society and his questions should not be reduced to a kind of evolutionary theory that tries to predict some future in the development of humanity, a sort of annunciation of a race of supermen. (18) Although this thinker starts from a progressive history, that is, a historiography apprehended by succeeding narratives, and inserts himself in the tradition of the teleological sociology (Marx and Durkheim), which believes that groups point their conducts towards destinies, the civilizing process, for Elias, culminates, in Ghiraldelli Jr.'s understanding, "in situations of greater freedom." (19) However, such a process does not deal with happiness but an incorporation in the course of a lifetime of behavioral patterns, of behaviors. (20)
From a broad empirical research, Elias interrelates levels of self-control and state formation in reducing violence. Today, less violent actions are tolerated than in other times and there is a banalization of what is visible, there is a relaxation of the norms of the duty to be referring to types of social behavior that go from table manners to hygiene corporal habits. (16,17) Therefore, there are pressures that affect individuals in order to "bring about a transformation of the whole economy of passions and affections towards a more continuous, stable and uniform regulation" of impulses in all sectors of life (p. 202). (16)
In this sense, what interests the long-term research on the civilizing process would be a retrospective reading of the history of sensitivity levels. Thus, such author and his developments on leisure are what is interesting.
Under the terms of the "civilizing process," which forces would act together with individuals in order to transform new economies of passions? How are bodies affected by a cultural practice located in time? And yet, how questions involving food and society can contribute to the development of the "process" of a practice that did not exist and ended up happening? A look at the sources may help.
The Birth of Picnic at Brazilian school Ginasio Santa Catarina
It was "about the middle of January 1906" when two priests received by telegram a call to "depart from there, really in the midst of a hazy night, from the Sao Leopoldo farm." (21) This quotation appears in the first lines of Diario do Padre Prefeito (The Diary of a Mayor Priest), written on March 13, 1906. It was the beginning of a story in the Republican moment of the Brazilian state of Santa Catarina. On March 15, 1906, the school Ginasio Santa Catarina would officially open its doors. (22)
And on Thursday morning, March 15, 1906, there was a sea bath "but the first had already occurred before on March 10." And in the afternoon a walk, "the first was on March 2, Friday." (21) On the following day [emphasis added], the bath appeared again in the morning and one writing stood out from the rest: "The place could not have been better." (21)
Months later, on May 15, said Diary points out that the priest director "left with some students on horseback to find some suitable place for a large tour." (21) Picnics were also called a "large tour" in the priests' diaries. (21,23) Two days later, a city newspaper featured, at the top of the front page, the title "Pic-Nic" and commented at the end that "no unpleasant incident" had occurred. (24)
These scattered notes from the priest's diary and the newspaper point to the beginnings of what the picnics are going to be in this institution and that are going to affect the city. Let us turn to the term itself.
Piquenique, of French origin, (25) is also expressed by the terms convescote (Portuguese) and picnic (English). In seventeenth-century France, it meant a practice in which each party would take their meal. And in the nineteenth century such eating activity spread to places like fields and forests, places of contact with nature and wildlife. Edouard Manet's oil on canvas painting Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe (English: The Luncheon on the Grass) painted between 1862 and 1863, illustrates this practice well. Which would lead to a question: What does picnic represent in a given society? Return to the Jesuit school, with its large photographic collection.
Figures 1, 2 and 3 were found loose inside an album, whose other photographs referred to the decade of 1910. However, they serve as a support to indicate that, until the beginning of these priests-teachers' activities in the city, there is no other evidence that picnics involving uses of physical force, playing, sea bathing and food in contact with nature life were thus ritualized in Florianopolis.
In the reports about picnics promoted by Ginasio Santa Catarina there are several indications of a ritual to be developed. In 1909, Praia dos Naufragados (a beach on Santa Catarina Island in Florianopolis, Santa Catarina, Brazil) would be described as a "picturesque and majestic" place where the students would be able to know "the rich and charming beauties of our state coast, as well as the numerous varieties of our Flora and Fauna." (26) And, two years before, [emphasis added] the Diario do Padre reports that on May 29, on the occasion of the "Holy Mass," a large tour at Morro da Cruz (a hill in Florianopolis), with departure at 8 am and arriving at 1 pm, in which bodies were "dead tired," after a "eating lots of oranges." (23)
What is different between the picnic referring to the origin of the term in nineteenth-century France and the "last picnic" promoted by the priests of the Jesuit school? Uses of physical force in a hobby activity, the need resulting from a deliberate and intentional physical activity associated with fun.
Here is an important phenomenon about an act of playing, bathing and eating linked to a physical work on the body in a moment of leisure close to nature on the island of Santa Catarina. The cultural practice of picnics should be developed as a utilitarian principle in a time of fun. Also, picnics need to be seen as practices that allow the emergence of new sensitivities and emotions that are not detached from a moment of the city of Florianopolis. Thus, immersed in this complexity, perhaps picnics are the fruit of a "practical reason."
For Sahlins, "practical reason" takes place as a rationality inscribed in a cultural form and can support the principles of utility of a "bourgeois" society through the "symbolic scheme of edibility" related to the scheme that "organizes the relations of production to precipitate, through distribution of income and demand, a whole totemic order, uniting in a parallel series of differences the people's status and what they eat." (27)
Sahlins, by shifting Levi-Strauss' wild thought to the "bourgeois thinking" of today's society, questions the limits of totemism, which, unlike for this Franco-Belgian anthropologist and philosopher, would no longer be a major element of the cultural system. What Sahlins suggests is that totemism has been replaced in the bourgeois society "by species and varieties of manufactured objects, which as totemic categories have the power to perform, even from the demarcation of their individual owners, a procedure of social classification" (pp. 196-7). (27)
According to Dallabrida, Ginasio Santa Catarina, the only secondary institution in the First Republic, served the "school manufacture of the elites" of Santa Catarina. (11) Thus, would it be relevant to ask if the picnic would be a place of social distinction? What is its importance in the republican moment of the city, a time of consolidation of a bourgeoisie in Florianopolis?
In an inventory of the picnic activities of Ginasio Santa Catarina throughout the city of Florianopolis, presented only in the Ginasio Reports between 1909 and 1911, the "Cronicas do ano escolar" (Chronicles of the school year) show that picnics were concentrated between the regions central (Morro da Cruz), south (Armacao, Naufragados) and east (Lagoa da Conceicao, Barra da Lagoa) of the Island of Santa Catarina. Between 1912 and 1913, they arrive at the northern region (Canasvieiras, Santo Antonio and Sambaqui) of the state capital, a "return to the Island," whose regions become part of the itinerary of the "large tours." And "overseas," between 1914 and 1918, the limits of the Island were exceeded: one arrives at the continent--cities of Sao Jose and Biguacu/Balneario de Sao Miguel.
Various compliments accompany the reports (fauna, flora, food, landscape) of a practice that, manufactured by the totemic operators (the Jesuit priests), cross, associate the symbolic schemes of edibility with the capitalist schemes of production. In this sense, picnic activities are part of the world of bourgeois thought, where new ways of life are invented.
As, according to Sahlins:
Modern totemism is not denied by a market rationality. [...] In giving shape to the product, man does not simply alienate his work, frozen in an objective form, but by the physical modifications it effects, it sediments a thought. The object stands as a human concept outside of itself, as if it were a man talking to a man, using things as a means of communication. [...] And because every difference thus developed by intervention with regard to utility needs to have a meaning and not only those characteristics, existing within nature by its own reasons that lend themselves to being culturally noticed. The bourgeois totemism, in other words, is potentially more elaborate than any wild variety. It is not that it has been liberated from a material-natural basis but precisely because nature has been domesticated (p. 198). (27)
A bourgeois totemism that communicates, gives meaning and signification in the form of utilitarianism. As in the chronicle of one of the reports of the large tour, in the exhibition of the "spectacle that the fishermen gave by gathering from the top with their frames and beautiful laces," evidencing such a craft activity as fishing. (28)
Meanings in the fimbriae of the capitalist production schemes, also expressed in the "maritime" tour to Balneario de Sao Miguel, "through the North bay" of the Island of Santa Catarina, which among "canoes of fishermen full of shrimps and orchards full of fruit," the students admired "signs of the industry of the small continental people" and soon got to know at the point of landing a "mill to peel rice with its carvings and grain stretches and its machineries engaging in a colossal hydraulic wheel"; and further on "a sawmill working with the driving force of the same water derived from a dam made on the nearby slope. It was a brewery." (29)
Large tours that gradually pass through each region of the Island of Santa Catarina, producing and signifying a "way of life defined in its own way," a "reproduction of the whole of nature" that "constitutes an objectification of the whole of culture" (p. 198). (27) So the picnic chronicles circulate in that society, processes that destroy nature (environment) and are determined by the categories of means and end: an instrumentality of the techniques that allow to produce, store and distribute food does not disappear after its products (fish, shrimp, fruit, rice, beer) are finished. Because, according to Arendt, "It survives it intact, ready, so to speak, to lend itself to an infinite continuation of manufacture." (30)
Therefore, "the most fundamental experience we have of instrumentality" is from the scope of manufacturing, since "everything and everyone are judged here in terms of suitability and usefulness for the desired end product." (31) An object is made that "stands as a human concept outside of itself, as if it were a man talking to a man, using things as a means of communication" (p. 198). (27)
In the bourgeois totemism, each difference is developed by its utilitarianism that needs signification, a utility that tames nature. In this case, the distinction by the totemic operation of the bourgeois thought is reflected in food (fish, shrimp, fruit, rice, beer) that can only be presented in the context of praise of the large tours because before they are already part of the "difference." Since they are not food of a less symbolic value, they are justified to the manufacture in the/of the picnic.
Now, is it only a coincidence that the reports present those and not other types of food? Did cassava plants no longer exist in Florianopolis? Why not introduce them on the large tours? Perhaps because they did not mean social distinction, such food would not interest these doers (Jesuit priests). Cassava was not found in any menu of the school daily life. On the contrary, the 1910 report lists imported foodstuffs, including "potato." (32)
And rice, presented along with its "mill to peel rice," would be consumed after the October 1919 departure during the lunch celebrating, among others, the fact that the boarding school students "walk the 9 km in 90 minutes" and so they would be received on a "festive ranch [with] roast, rice and Brazilian feijoada, coffee, sweet bread and an abundance of fruits." (33)
And why "beer" and not other beverages? In 1918, the Diario shows that at the end of the football match between the Boarding School versus the Regular School, in which these "won 2:1," after the contest "lunch with beer would be served to the players," which shows that this was already part of this symbolic universe. (34)
And on the value of the seafood, the report of a 1916 "feast of St. John" presents "wood ovens" and "coals for their sardines, roasting small fish and even plump fish [...] inviting each other to partake the tasty dainty" (p. 22, emphasis added). (35)
Therefore, there seems to be a relationship between the symbolic scheme of edibility and the scheme of production, distribution, and demand of the capitalist system, which is signified in the compliments reported from the picnics at the Ginasio. A utilitarianism that would compete in the construction of the most varied gallantries of this (environmental) nature being mastered. Praise that, from Sahlins' perspective, produces new ways of life that unite status, groups and people.
So far, the place of difference of the picnic with the exuberant nature of the Island of Santa Catarina seems to justify or allow the advances of a way of life from the praise speeches that involve the utilities of new modes of capitalist production, be it the "spectacle" of artisanal fishing, be it the "signs of the industry." The relationship of the practical reason of bourgeois thought and the matrix of food production.
There would be no evidence of the new economy of passions in the sphere of a developing social personality. The way of life derived from the picnics points to another nature being tamed: that of the students' bodies.
In search of the body that eats, tires and has fun
Situated on the seafront, in one of the most picturesque and healthy places of the beautiful city of Florianopolis, comprising vast areas for hygiene games and sea baths, the Gymnasio Santa Catharina can assure the parents everything needed for their children's physical well-being. [...] In the break from the studies there will be recreation, walks, sea baths and gymnastic exercises (p. 54, emphasis added). (32)
Reports from the Ginasio present this call, which takes advantage of the locality of the "beautiful city of Florianopolis" and "guarantees" to parents what is necessary for "their children's physical well-being," involving in the "breaks from studies [...] recreation, walks, sea baths and gymnastic exercises." There is a utilitarianism of the waterfront situation.
About the emergence of sea bath in the city of Florianopolis, Ferreira understands that it has dictated new fashions, new costumes, it has transformed mentalities and habits, shut down entrenched prejudices and elicited others. There is a displacement of feelings and emotions with the invention of the sea bath and a new sensibility is born, that of a city in contact with nature. (36) The author finds in his research in the local newspapers of the time that in the early 1920s sea baths would be represented as a "leisure" activity. (36)
As indicated in Figure 3, we find sources that show sea baths happening in this type of picnic since 1906, the year of the opening of the gates of the Jesuit school in the city. Therefore, there is a practice of body training, understanding it as leisure, without, however, such theme having still acquired territoriality in/by the city of Florianopolis. This fact leads to the necessity of unfolding the question of the new economy of passions in view of the picnics.
INSERIR NOVAMENTE FIG 3
In this impasse, Alain Corbin can help. This French historian, who researched the emergence of the desire to be on the seafront and sea bathing in Europe in the book The territory of the void: the beach and the social imaginariness, shows that the practice of sea bathing in Europe had its roots in the seventeenth century and was established between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From the second half of the eighteenth century, it awakened in Europeans the "collective desire for beaches," for which "the shores of the ocean are going to emerge as an alternative to the evils of civilization." (37)
The sea, once the backyard, was now being outlined, like gardens named through different seaside resort towns, and would become an expression of the nature mastered. It is a work of a practical reason of the bourgeois thought.
We return to Figures 1 "Foods and drinks after walking" and 2 "The climbing that reveals the conquest of nature does not hide the joke of holding the priest's briefcase." Here the dialogue of ethnography with history produces a historiography that deals not only with the sea, but with a ritual that also involves corporeity and eating/edibility/sociability and playing.
Do the images of past show a content that can be interpreted? How could an activity that did not exist turn out to happen? What forces are these that on the Island of Santa Catarina would act in the expression of a nature being mastered? That is, what elements contribute to the production of a new sensation: that of the body that eats at the picnic before, during and after physical exercises? What conditions affect bodies that play and eat?
Fischler can contribute on the loose threads of this search by presenting that man is an omnivore that feeds on meat, vegetables and "[...] on the imaginariness. Food refers to biology, but it does not remain there. What is symbolic and dreams, signs, myths, and fantasies also feed us and help standardize our diet." (38) Nowadays, there is the development of an unprecedented corporeality relationship in the city. Engaging students' bodies in physical activities of mobility and strength was not common until then. In the eighties, when the city was called Desterro, Cabral emphasizes that physical activities would not be practiced by the elite.
An oar is an example, which "was not for a certain youth, who would not expose muscles that they did not have, nor capable breath that would rise at 10 o'clock, who would prefer the practices of sonnets, dating [...] Fearing to catch wind and expose themselves to the sun." (39) Thus, "the ones who would row would be those used to working hard, the heavyweights, the stevedores[...] from the merchant navy or the war[...] smelling of (Brazilian drink) cachaca from the land and not of violet liqueur." (39)
The first club of this sport, dated 1861 by naval officers' initiatives, invited members to a regatta, not to participate with their strength in the sport, but to see "the oar people" in action. Therefore, for Cabral, "It is almost certain that rowing did not conquer the local sportsmen" because the strength that was necessary for that type of boat that would cause a "hand full of calluses" should not be much in the taste "of the fine youth of Desterro" (p. 216). (39)
Fun to see and not to do in terms of the habits or customs that, with the opening of the gates of the Jesuit school, would displace a whole relationship involving bodies, exercises and natures. There is a rupture between that elite pointed out by Cabral and this one, represented by the heir students of Ginasio Santa Catarina. How does such process take place?
Although the following is a hypothesis, it may not be naive to assume that totemic operators do not disregard food relations, or rather, of edibility and sociability. According to Leach, the criteria of edibility involve issues of culture and language, not of nature, so that "our" classification of a food is "morally just and marks our superiority." (40)
Such a perspective leads to a "cultural discrimination" of the classification of "edible" into three main categories:
1. Edible substances that are recognized as food and consumed as part of a normal diet. 2. Edible substances that are recognized as possible foods but which are prohibited or allowed to be eaten only under special (ritual) conditions. These are substances that are consciously interdicted. 3. Edible substances which, by culture and language, are not recognized in any way as food. These substances are unconsciously interdicted (p. 175, emphasis added). (40)
Here, unlike from the British anthropologist, attention is not going to be given to "unconsciously interdicted" foods, those substances that are edible but which are not classified as food. It is sought to understand how, in the picnic ritual of Ginasio Santa Catarina, what one would eat would be at the same time a food present "as part of the normal diet" while being eaten under "special conditions."
What are the conditions for a normal food to be also special? Is it possible to infer that in the order of knowledge-power the classification of what is edible can participate in the transformations towards a new economy of emotions on the Island of Santa Catarina? Certainly, language "does more than provide us with a classification of things" because "it shapes our environment and places each individual at the center of a social space ordered in a logical and secure manner" (p. 179). (40)
According to Leach, "All that is taboo is sacred, valuable, important, powerful, dangerous, untouchable, unclean, infamous" (p. 180). (40) A taboo that separates "the self from the world and then to divide the world itself into zones of social distances," which in Leach's terms corresponds to: house, farm, field and remote (pp. 192-5). (40) Thus, motivated by this anthropologist's considerations about areas of social distance, it may be plausible to consider that picnics at the outset would be something "remote." There was a utilitarian need for symbolic constructions that focused on its materiality in order to bring it closer to the relations of "field," perhaps translated by the terms "picturesque," "majestic," "rich," "beautiful" so often expressed in the reports that could communicate in the processes of differentiation of practical reason spaces closer to the "farm."
What is of interest here is the hypothesis that the proportional relation of the utilitarianism of food edibility would contribute to the displacement of the extreme zones (house and remote, certainly picnics were of the latter classification) to the intermediate zones (field and farm where edible relations take place), which, in turn, by ensuring familiarity (in the unknown place I eat what I already know), would thus contribute to the development of that sociability.
Food as a filling of social and environmental relations. What were they carrying in their hands and mugs that went to their mouths in Figure 1? If our hypothesis could be verified--that the symbolic scheme of edibility participates in the production of sociability in view of the new--, then it makes sense to maintain that the school everyday food--fruits, bread, sausage--would also be that consumed on the special days of picnic.
In an interview conducted with a student from the school, submitted to the same boarding school regime of the students of our study, but logically from another time (1950), two sentences stand out: 1) They were the same foods, those offered daily and at the school exits since "the party can not distance you from the place you live in"; and 2) As for the relationship between physical activity and food, our informant reports that "it was a very articulated thing," since "the meal position anticipates the recreation or some activity." (41) These somewhat loose sentences may perhaps be better tied with other data from our research.
Back to our clipping, on February 17 it is recorded in the Diario (emphasis added) that "in the cafeteria they serve two meat dishes for dinner." And on April 11, 1918 (same year), for the luncheon that preceded the picnic they would serve "bread, sausage and coffee." This picnic that was a "forced march of the volunteer [students] around Morro da Cruz," which "took from 9:30 to 12 noon," and on their return, "bread, sausage, meat, rice" were served at our lunch [emphasis added]. (34) A practice of physical exercise ending with lunch.
At the picnic of 1916, a demonstration of "how much energy lives and boils in our young people, who, as playing, have won a distance of up to 40 km," when the "disciplined army" on "the beach in front of the Island of Naufragados [in the south of the island]," there was a "short rest" in which "wheat and corn bread with sausage" had been served, which "disappeared as if by a spell" and "oranges of superior quality [which] quenched our thirst" (pp. 17-8, emphasis added). (35) A new coronation, now held on the return from the picnic, when "a gaucho-style barbecue was prepared by skilled hands, [which] invites us to celebrate with dignity and so victorious." (35)
Meats, breads and fruits, food served daily and in ritual with all care by the totemic Jesuit priests and operators, so that "not only coffee, but all lunch was served warm" at the same picnic that praises breweries and rice. (29) Thus, there seems to be a relation between the "symbolic scheme of edibility" of what is incorporated and new forms of sociability (p. 196). (27) That is to say, perhaps it is necessary to distinguish from the "other," in this case, the unexplored (remote) environment and thus open up this new place (which is going to be picturesque, majestic, rich, beautiful) in structured edible relations that facilitate cracks in opening up to new configurations through the sociability that the food act promotes: new artificiality.
According to Douglas, in the importance of "deciphering a meal," one must take into account the circumstances in which one eats, one has a meal--weekdays, Sunday lunch, parties. (42) In our case: the picnic days. Days of large tour that, in order to exist, i.e., to be inscribed on the bodies, may necessitate that totemic operators take advantage, in the utilitarianism of this practical reason, of the intimacy relations that eating moments provide. After all, "each meal is structured in the social event that structures others in its own image" (p. 44). (42)
If Figure 1 represents a structure similar to that of "bodies [that] were dead tired" that would reach the intimacy of the "house" after "eating lots of oranges," then what is special for the body that eats in this event is given by the reinforcement of the food image itself, which, because it is also consumed in the daily intimacy, displaces estrangement to familiarity. After all, Douglas would already point out that "meals express close friendship" (p. 41). (42) And there is more to the picnic eating ritual.
A utilitarianism that would act in the transformation of the new economies of passions, so that sea baths, walks, in short, physical exercises, seem to be closely linked to the relations of food and fun. A body that eats and plays. In Figure 2, before or after eating, even in that composition expression of physical strength (rock climbing) and playing (a student taking the priest's briefcase), there was still vigilance and control in this pastime. If the priest's eyes did not authorize that moment, surely that image would not be on the school album.
It is written in the Diario do Padre of 1907 that on March 7, "Before the tour, the line was miserably composed. Therefore, after strolling, straight to study. I let the bozos just go to the latrine." (23) Therefore, in this moment of excitement and emotion, "the pleasant uncontrolled emotions under control" (p. 80) (15) are maintained. We handle picnics as one of the gaming activities that Elias and Dunning categorize.
Practical reason which the priests-teachers already understood, since coming from such a large tour there would be a kind of relief from the stress from the work society, because "one day a week at least is going to be destined to rest." (43)
The body that is amused, gets tired, eats and returns to the cycle of school work is given an opportunity through the picnic object. It is oriented in the utilitarianism of its practices, also called "hygienic marches," whose "breathing another air, less stifled than the one in the classes" does well "to the students' body." (44)
Picnics that continually practiced contribute to the production of these school bodies that work. In modernity, the "productive work," that is, the "glorification of labor," yearns for a durability in its results (p. 178). (31) After all, "most of the chores in the modern world are performed in the form of work" (p. 175). (30)
A Jesuit pedagogy that uses the characteristics of pastimes in the production of such manufactured body. That is, knowledge-power relations that compete for new economies of passions through the excitement of picnics. Games activities characterized by sociability, mobility and mimesis (pp. 178-185). (15)
In every great walk there are aspects of "sociability," an element of pleasure that refers to the pleasant feeling of being in the company of others without the weight of the obligation or duty of this company. (15)
But the power is relational. Therefore, "the burden of obligation." If it does not exist, this is due to the displacement by the totemic operators, who in their stratagems create, sometimes on commemorative dates of the new republic, sometimes on commemorative dates of the Jesuit team, as on the Dean Priest's birthdays or catholic holidays. Reasons for picnics along with the cathartic need for this leisure.
And thus encounters are invented between the picnic subjects self and others as places and corporeity hitherto unknown. Encounters mediated by relationships of intimacy and friendship offered by eating. A sociability in the city that is interdependent from its environment (native forest, rivers, lakes and seas) that transforms habits and affects bodies.
A pedagogy that links eating to a physical work on the body. Both on the large tour to Morro da Cruz, on the occasion of the "Holy Mass" to which arrived those bodies "dead tired" after "eating lots of oranges" [emphasis added], (23) as on the tour "energy" demonstration of the young people "who, as if playing, won a distance of up to 40 km," being received on their return by a "a gaucho-style barbecue prepared by skilled hands [which] invites us to celebrate with dignity and so victorious" (pp.17-8, emphasis added). (35)
This is another form of excitement: the "mobility" resulting from these physical activities that demand the use of muscular force. (15) And, as Figures 1, 2, and 3 suggest, physical activities (rock climbing, sea bathing) are related to edibility symbolic schemes.
As a final example, this same account of physical activities also suggests another mode of excitement that amuses: imitation. The young people playfully demonstrated "energy" "by overcoming a distance of up to 40 km." We understand that the Santa Catarina elites heirs in the victory of the physical effort celebrated with "a gaucho-style barbecue," linking edibility and commensality, imitate, not as a repetition of it, but producing representations of what means to be victorious.
And Pick, who has analyzed the school until 1970, has already shown the importance of these heirs to the city and the state of Santa Catarina, based on the discipline and leisure/sports practices of the Ginasio, where "a true army of almost forty thousand students frequenting the classrooms, patios and corridors, many reaching great local, state and national prominence" (p. 92). (10)
In the eating-physical activities link, the act of playing should be noticed. In the magic of playing there is a "playing [that] always means liberation" of "children [who] are not men or women in small sizes." (45)
Here, Benjamin's implications on the existential (experiential) dimension of toys are what is interesting. Action that must overcome the "basic misconception that believed children's playing to be determined by the toy imaginary content when, in fact, it is the opposite." (45) Therefore, even if there is control and vigilance from the eyes (Figure 2), there is always something that escapes in the experience of playing.
From Benjamin's thought, possibilities of involving in the picnic object the body that eats as source of a playful action in playing is pointed out. As well as "archaic instruments of playing," that is, "ball, bow, wheel and feathers, kite--authentic toys," also they are "as more authentic as they are less similar to the adult's" [emphasis added]. (46) After all, it is the child who determines the toy. Power of playing that can turn everything into a toy. Magic, because it is the imaginary and symbolic content in the child's playing that determines their playing activity and not the toys in their material dimension.
As a result of these picnics and their resulting excitement and emotion (from imitations that produce representations, from sociabilities and food edibilities and physical activities), we have a new signification or the creation of new habits. Therefore, the cultural dynamics does not occur only within the scope of reproduction but carries within itself the possibility of new productions.
For it is the game, and nothing else, that gives birth to every habit. Eating, sleeping, washing should be inculcated in the small restless person in a playful way, with the accompaniment of lullabies. Habits enter into life as a playful thing and in them, even in their more rigid forms, a bit of the playfulness survives until the end. Petrified and unrecognizable forms of our first happiness, our first terror, this is what habits are. [...] When a modern poet says that for each one there is an image in whose contemplation the whole world submerges, for how many people doesn't this image rise from an old box of toys? (47)
Therefore, it is inferred that in the value of the playing of bodies with food, bodies in the sea baths, bodies in physical activity (of force and mobility) there is imagination in action, power that determines in the picnic toy a creative and sensory process. Thus, we understand that such leisure activities have contributed to dictating new passions--a body that exercises, plays, bathes in the sea or pond, eats and drinks. Forces that build a new social imaginariness. A picnic here distinguished not only from that of nineteenth-century France but as a producer of differences among those of Ginasio Santa Catarina and so many others in the city.
With the birth of this way of life, possibilities for new symbolizations arose from this pastime, among signs, myths and fantasies that Fischler (38) presented and that would also provide new food regulations (which, with whom, how much and when eaten at a picnic).
By way of conclusion
Before picnic being a mass society fun, deriving from practices such as trekking, camping, fun products consumed like any other consumer goods, there is the manufacturing, in the cultural world, of interdependent relations of the environment involving bodies and food, playing, sea baths and physical activities, creating new forms of life that serve to differentiate, exclude, and privilege, and belong to the bourgeois thought. And food, the act of incorporating food into new relationships, of the tired body, of the environment that is named and contoured, needs to be expanded beyond nutrient levels.
In this way, assuming the complexity of food in life in society, which can be historically analyzed, means expanding its participation in the human form of which we are part. And in this work we have avoided at least two limitations.
Initially, it is not necessary to circumscribe some kind of hierarchy in our object. Therefore, it does not make sense to know which of the elements (eating, swimming, exercising, playing) was the most important for the advent of picnic on the Island of Santa Catarina. At the limit, it is the order of the process, not of the hierarchy, for it is the complexity of the parts that underlies the whole of our object.
Another limitation concerns objects built in the world of culture, which respond to relationships involving knowledge, power and ethics in the ways of conducting oneself and others. Although we locate the making of picnic by a given elite, as it becomes part of the cultural dynamics it escapes the totalizing of some myth of origin. It happens that knowledge-power-ethics games are themselves appropriated in the course of time by other social agents (formerly excluded by ethnic, class, and gender cut-offs). Therefore, picnics are plural, going beyond possibilities secured by the first constructed order. It is a kind of opening that alternates between the structured, obligatory, and the bypass, or shortcut, and other rather forbidden initial paths. Therefore, to extend the relationships that involve bodies and food, this is the story we tell about the birth of picnic on the Island of Santa Catarina.
Finally, we seek to contribute to deepen the dialogue between HSS and the "field" of Food and Nutrition. In one sentence: We start from the body that eats while playing life, having as destination the horizon of this becoming.
DOI: 10.12957/demetra.2016.16083
Acknowledgment
Our thanks to Brazilian school Colegio Catarinense for the availability of access to the archives and the authorization to use its collection of photographs.
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Received: April 15, 2015
Reviewed: August 19, 2015
Accepted: September 29, 2015
Thiago Perez Jorge [1]
[1] Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Programa de Pos-graduacao em Historia. Florianopolis-SC, Brasil.
This essay is one of the products of the author thesis in the area of Cultural History with the Postgraduation Program in History (Portuguese abbreviation PPGH) of Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina [Federal University of Brazilian State Santa Catarina].
Correspondence
Thiago Perez Jorge
E-mail: thipjorge@gmail.com
Caption: Figure 1. Walking, eating and drinking at a picnic party [191?]
Caption: Figure 2. Conquering nature at a picnic party [191?]
Caption: Figure 3. Sea bathing at a picnic party [191?]
Caption: Figure 1
Caption: Figure 2
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| Title Annotation: | FREE THEMED ARTICLES; texto en ingles |
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| Author: | Jorge, Thiago Perez |
| Publication: | Demetra: Food, Nutrition & Health |
| Date: | Jun 1, 2016 |
| Words: | 8235 |
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