Day of the Dead in Mexico City – Crowds, floats and colorful dancers fill the streets to the sound of loud drums and horns. In the spectacle of skulls, one wonders whether anything could be more reminiscent of the Mexican national anthem. But I found a problem. Mexico City held its first parade in 2016. james bond A film released last year (Agren 2019). Mexico’s antique celebrations were transplanted to the West, conveniently transformed and reunited with their homeland in a different form, as if they had never left. In 1970, anthropologist Agehananda Bharati (1970, 273) playfully coined this phenomenon the ‘pizza effect’. Sedgwick (2007, 4) speculates:
Originally, Italian pizza was a simple dish made with tomato toppings on bread. Pizza was brought to the United States by Italian immigrants, where it developed into its current, more complex form, and spread to Europe, including Italy, after World War II. Modern pizza is now considered purely Italian, but this is not the case.
How should we interpret our social imagination when the stories behind our people’s customs, myths, and signs are undermined? Since the 1980s, many theories have been put forward to map national modernity and nationalism, despite their superficial primitivism. Perhaps most relevant to the pizza effect is the invented tradition introduced by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger. Hobsbawm (1983, 6, 2) explains that this is ‘a response to a new situation which either takes the form of a reference to an old situation or establishes its own past’ and that ‘new traditions can be easily grafted onto old traditions. It is a storehouse of official rituals, symbols and moral exhortations.’ We can then consider the pizza effect as one of many explanations behind traditional inventions. The two examples presented so far show that Bharati’s theory can be mild. This likely explains numerous cross-cultural cases around the world in the modern age of global communication and convenient travel.
However, the possibility that pizza-related data could be collected to foster national consciousness and develop into a passionate nationalism cannot be ignored. As Hobsbawm (1983, 7) argues, before the late eighteenth century the unprecedented theme of nationalism meant that ‘even historical continuity had to be invented’. In our case, this makes it possible to endow culturally transplanted phenomena with a superficial antiquity and consequent loyalty through a process similar to forgery. In this regard, reference may be made to the stages of nationalism by Miroslav Hroch (1985, 23). The first is the academic study of the attributes assigned to cultural groups to promote recognition, identity, and grouping. By recognizing these concepts, we can understand not only why the pizza effect is conducive to the creation of traditions and the national entrepreneurs who promote them, but also how reculturalization can ultimately contribute to building more active and developed nationalist movements. You can.
The Khmu are an ethnic minority group mainly living in Laos. According to Proschan (2001, 1025), the collection and dissemination of folk tales by external collectors amounts to a pizzazz effect that powerfully shapes their imaginations. These legends take the form of rivalry stories that see a minority defeated by another local population. For some, this is evidence of an inferiority complex internalized by the Khmu through the recultivation of fictional stories spread by outsiders. One story told to the Chinese scholar Li Daoyong (1984, 15) is typical.
According to legend, they were brothers. Kammu (alternative spelling) was the older brother and Khbit was the younger brother. One day, Brother Kammu killed an elephant and gave some of the meat to Brother Kvit. Later, Brother Kvit caught a hedgehog and gave some of its meat to Brother Kammu. The Kammu brothers discovered that hedgehogs had thicker fur than elephants, so they thought hedgehogs must be bigger than elephants. However, he claimed that his younger brother Kvitt had been unfaithful because he got very little meat from him. Finally, he said to his younger brother, “Let’s break up the family and live separately!”
This example is interesting in that the pizzazz effect is not required to promote ethnic extravagance. Nonetheless, the collective ‘self-deprecating acceptance of derogatory stereotypes’ enriches national identity insofar as it allows the Khmu to better conceptualize ‘their place in the region’s ethnically determined socioeconomic hierarchy’ (Proschan 2001, 1025). Revised feedback on indigenous folklore enabled the group to recognize its unique and binding shortcomings.
Reculturation here was and continues to be the case among Hindu nationalists in India, although the energetic quest for self-determination has failed. In 1785, Charles Wilkins published the first English translation of the Bhagavad Gita, the most widely accepted Hindu scripture. He originally considered Sanskrit to be similar to Latin and Greek and suitable for comparison with European philosophy. As British colonial rule intensified throughout the next century, the Gita came under increasing interpretation, and its influence on Indian thought was ensured by imperialist socio-economic forces. However reculturalized, the greatest influence on this Hindu Renaissance was Edwin Arnold’s poetic rendering of the Gita. song celestial (1885) (Larson 1975, 664-65). Around this time, Mahatma Gandhi (1959, 12), a student in London, described reading the text for the first time.
I read it from cover to cover and was fascinated. After that, the last 19 verses of Chapter 2 were engraved on my heart. It contains all knowledge for me.
Gandhi’s study of this work partly inspired his commitment to the doctrines of truth and non-violence, and combined with the influence of British liberalism, he formulated a self-governance movement with a religious flavor. As Larson (1975, 665) puts it, ‘the guitar… is a kind of nationalist pamphlet and symbol of universal spirituality’. This Orientalist pizza effect, which ‘was the driving force of nationalism’, did not disappear after independence (Jouhki 2006, 75). As late as 2001, influential nationalists maintained their reculturation observance when the Indian Space Research Organization referenced the Vedas, a large collection of ancient Hindu scriptures, to justify scientific recognition of astrology. This is because Vedic writings have historically been valued by Western intellectuals. (Nanda 2003, 107).
So far we have seen how the pizza effect can create traditions, give rise to vibrant nationalism, and, if not, at least emphasize national distinctiveness. But what about ultra-nationalism or post-nationalism? In 2015, the EU Pizza Effect project saw organizations from seven member states collaborate to host cooking workshops showcasing their national cuisine. The European Union heralded this patronage as unlocking ‘active social integration into the European community’ to explain the ‘blind acceptance of everything new and foreign’ among its constituent countries (Berlak & Poljanšek 2015, 7). Even overlooking the fact that Block’s interpretation of the pizza effect differs from Bharati’s, it’s clear that such a commitment requires more than sharing Hungarian stuffed peppers. Conversely, the transnational capacity for reculturalization cannot be ignored. Existing scholarship on this phenomenon is sparse, cataloging its profound influence on spiritual movements, from Buddhism to Wahhabism to New Age Mayanism, without a clear territory or national culture (Borup 2004; Sedgwick 2007; Sitler 2012). My work attempts to redress this imbalance, but the EU could also learn more from the borderless potential of the pizza effect at the same time.
In concluding his book on the subject, Hobsbawm (1992, 192) predicted the imminent end of nationalism and nationalism. Hegel said that Minerva’s owl, bringing wisdom, flies at dusk. Hobsbawm’s failure to acknowledge the process behind his theory of created traditions paints the statement as somewhat complacent, implying that our increased understanding portends their demise. The complex matrix of imperialism and ongoing globalization has revealed that the pizza effect is probably just one of many phenomena that sustain this process. In this way, reculturation maintains the ability to shape collective imaginations while also providing continuity for the nation and nationalism.
References
David Agren (October 27, 2019). ‘Mexican Day of the Dead’ is resurrected from cemeteries to popular culture. search location guardian October 13, 2024: https://archive.ph/gkq7Y
Berlak, Domen, and Poljanšek, Matej (2015). EU Pizza Effect: Food Fusion Using Recipes. London: Lotus Trust.
Bharati, Agehananda (1970). ‘Hindu Renaissance and its dialectical patterns’. Journal of Asian Studies, 29(2), pp. 267–87.
Boruf, Örn (2004). ‘The Art of Inventing Zen and Orientalism: Buddhism, Religious Studies, and Interrelated Networks’ in Peter Antes, Armin W. Geertz, and Randi R. Warne (eds.). New approaches to the study of religion: Volume 1: Regional, critical, and historical approaches. Berlin: Walter de Grüter. pp. 451-87.
Lee, Da-yong (1984). ‘The Kammu people of China and their social customs’. Asian Folklore, 43(1), pp. 15-28.
Gandhi, Mahatma (1959). guitar messageRamachandra Krishna Prabhu (Comp.). Ahmedabad: Navajivan Trust.
Hobsbawm, Eric (1983). ‘Introduction: Inventing Tradition’ in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.). invention of tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pages 1-14.
Hobsbawm, Eric (1992). Nations and nationalism since 1780: programs, myths and realities.. 2nd Ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hroch, Miroslav (1985). Social prerequisites for national revival in Europe: Comparative analysis of the social composition of patriotic groups in small European countries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Zucchi, J. (2006). Imagining the Other: Orientalism and Occidentalism in South Indian Tamil-European Relations.. Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä.
Larson, Gerald James (1975). ‘“Bhagavad Gītā” as an intercultural process: Towards an analysis of the social location of religious texts’. American Journal of Religion, 43(4), pp. 651-69.
Nanda, Mira (2003). Prophets in retreat: A postmodern critique of science and Hindu nationalism in India.. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Proshan, Frank (2001). ‘Park’s People: Imagined Peoples of the Southeast Asian Highlands’. Journal of Asian Studies, 60(4), pp. 999-1032.
Sedgwick, Mark (2007). ‘Islamic terrorism and the ‘pizza effect’’. Perspectives on terrorism, 1(6), pp. 3-6.
Sittler, Robert K. (2012). ‘The phenomenon of 2012 is the advent of an era.’ new religion, 16(1), pp. 61-87.
Additional Resources on E-International Relations
