Day of the Dead in Mexico City – crowds, floats and masses of ornate dancers fill the streets to the sound of blaring drums and horns. Amid this spectacle of skulls, one wonders if there is anything more evocative of the Mexican nation. But we find a problem; Mexico City only hosted its first parade in 2016, borrowing from a scene from James Bond film released the previous year (Agren 2019). The ancient celebration of Mexico had been transplanted to the West, conveniently modified and reunited with its homeland in a different form, as if it had never left. In 1970, anthropologist Agehananda Bharati (1970, 273) playfully coined this phenomenon as the “pizza effect.” As Sedgwick (2007, 4) surmises:
The original Italian pizza was a simple dish consisting of bread topped with tomatoes. Brought to America by Italian immigrants, pizza was developed there into its current, more complex form, which, after World War II, spread to Europe, including Italy. Contemporary pizza is now considered purely Italian, but this is not the case.
How do we interpret our social imagination once the narratives behind our customs, myths and national markers are compromised? Since the 1980s, numerous theories mapping the modernity of nations and nationalism have been put forward, despite their apparent primordialism. Perhaps the most relevant pizza effect is the invented traditions introduced by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger. Hobsbawm (1983, 6, 2) explains that these are “responses to new situations which take the form of a reference to old situations or which establish their own past”, adding that “new traditions could easily piggybacking on old ones… by borrowing from the well-stocked storehouses of official rituals, symbolism and moral exhortation. We could then consider the pizza effect as one of the many explanations for the invention of traditions. The two examples offered so far show the possible benignity of Bharati’s theory, which, in our modern age of global communications and easy travel, probably explains countless cross-cultural cases around the world.
However, the possibility of gathering pizza-effect materials to foster national consciousness – with the capacity to evolve into burning nationalism – cannot be ignored. As Hobsbawm (1983: 7) argues, the unprecedented theme of nationalism before the end of the 18th century meant “that even historical continuity had to be invented”. In our case, this presumably gives culturally transplanted phenomena a superficial antiquity, and the loyalty that this implies, through a process close to counterfeiting. In the same vein, we could draw inspiration from the phases of nationalism of Miroslav Hroch (1985: 23), the first being the scientific research of the attributes attached to a cultural group in order to promote consciousness, identity and collectivization. By recognizing these concepts, we can not only understand why the pizza effect is conducive to the invention of tradition and the ethnic entrepreneurs who encourage it, but also how re-enculturation could potentially contribute to the building of more active and nationalist movements. more developed.
The Khmu are an ethnic minority located mainly in Laos. According to Proschan (2001: 1025), the collection and proliferation of folk tales by external collectors amounts to a pizza effect which strongly shapes their imagination. These legends take the form of stories of competitions in which the minority loses to other regional populations. For some, this reflects an inferiority complex that the Khmu have internalized through the re-enculturation of fictional stories disseminated by foreigners. A story transmitted to the Chinese researcher Li Daoyong (1984: 15) is typical:
Legend has it that they were brothers: Kammu (alternative spelling) was the older brother and Khbit the younger brother. One day Brother Kammu caught an elephant and gave some of the meat to younger Brother Khbit. Later, younger brother Khbit caught a porcupine and gave some of the meat to brother Kammu. Brother Kammu discovered that the porcupine’s hair was thicker than that of the elephant and thought that the porcupine must be bigger than the elephant. But since he had received such a small amount of meat from the younger brother Khbit, he alleged that the younger brother had been unfaithful. Finally, he said to the younger brother: “Let’s separate the family and live apart!” “.
This example is interesting since the pizza effect is not used to promote ethnic splendor. Nevertheless, a “collective acceptance and self-deprecation of pejorative stereotypes” fertilizes national identity to the extent that the Khmu are better able to conceptualize “their own place in local socio-economic hierarchies determined by ethnic origin” (Proschan 2001 , 1025). The altered responses of indigenous folklore allowed this group to appreciate their unique and constraining disadvantage.
While here re-enculturation failed to initiate a forceful quest for self-determination, it did and continues to do so among India’s Hindu nationalists. In 1785, Charles Wilkins produced the first English translation of the Bhagavad Gita, the most widely adopted Hindu scripture. He viewed his original Sanskrit as similar to Latin and Greek, ripe for comparison with European philosophies. As Britain’s colonial grip tightened over the next century, the Gita was subject to more interpretations, their influence on Indian thought underwritten by a milieu of imperial socio-economic forces. The most influential in this Hindu Renaissance, even re-enculturated, was the poetic interpretation of the Gita by Edwin Arnold, The heavenly song (1885) (Larson 1975, 664-65). A student in London at the time, Mahatma Gandhi (1959: 12) describes his first reading of the text:
I devoured the content cover to cover and was fascinated. The last nineteen verses of the second chapter have since been inscribed on the tablet of my heart. They contain all knowledge for me.
Gandhi’s study of the work partly inspired his commitment to the principles of truth and non-violence, combining with the influence of British liberalism to formulate a religious-flavored self-governance movement. As Larson (1975: 665) states, “the Gita… is a kind of nationalist tract, as well as a symbol of universal spirituality.” This orientalist pizza effect, which “had fueled the mill of nationalism”, did not disappear after independence (Jouhki 2006: 75). Until 2001, influential nationalists maintained their embrace of re-enculturation when the Indian Space Research Organization referenced the Vedas – a vast corpus of ancient Hindu texts – to justify its scientific recognition of astrology, these writings having been historically valued by Western intellectuals. (Nanda 2003, 107).
So far we have seen how the pizza effect is capable of inventing traditions and engendering vigorous nationalism and, where this is not the case, can at least emphasize ethnic particularities . But what about supra- or post-nationalism? In 2015, the European Pizza Effect project saw organizations from seven member states collaborate to run cooking workshops showcasing their national dishes. Attempting to illustrate “the blind acceptance of everything new and foreign” among its constituent nations, the European Union presented this sponsorship as enabling “active social integration into the European community” (Berlak and Poljanšek 2015 , 7). Clearly, such engagement will require more than sharing Hungarian stuffed peppers, even if one overlooks the bloc’s interpretation of the pizza effect as different from Bharati’s. Conversely, the transnational capacity of re-enculturation cannot be dismissed. Existing studies of the phenomenon, although rare, have documented its profound impact on spiritual movements without demarcated territory or national culture, from Buddhism to Wahhabism to New Age Mayanism (Borup 2004; Sedgwick 2007; Sitler 2012). Although my article has attempted to correct this imbalance, the EU could at the same time learn more from the borderless potential of the pizza effect.
In the conclusion of his book on the subject, Hobsbawm (1992: 192) predicts the imminent disappearance of nations and nationalism: “the owl of Minerva which brings wisdom, said Hegel, flies away at dusk”. Implying that our increased understanding foreshadows their end, Hobsbawm’s failure to recognize the processes behind his own theory of invented traditions gives this remark a somewhat complacent character. The complex matrices of imperialism and continuing globalization have revealed that the pizza effect is likely just one of many phenomena fueling this process. If re-enculturation thus retains its capacity to shape collective imaginations, it also offers itself to the sustainability of nations and nationalisms.
References
Agren, David (October 27, 2019). “Mexican Day of the Dead festival moves out of graveyard and into pop culture”. Retrieved from The guardian October 13, 2024: https://archive.ph/gkq7Y
Berlak, Domen and Poljanšek, Matej (2015). European pizza effect: food fusion with recipes. London: The Lotus Trust.
Bharati, Agehananda (1970). “The Hindu Renaissance and its apologetic models”. Journal of Asian Studies, 29(2), pages 267 to 87.
Borup, Jørn (2004). “Zen and the Art of Inventing 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 Gruyter. p. 451-87.
Daoyong, Li (1984). “The Kammu people in China and their social customs.” Asian folk studies, 43(1), p. 15-28.
Gandhi, Mahatma (1959). The message of the GitaRamachandra Krishna Prabhu (comp.). Ahmedabad: Navajivan Trust.
Hobsbawm, Eric (1983). “Introduction: Inventing Traditions” in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.). The invention of tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 1 to 14.
Hobsbawm, Eric (1992). Nations and nationalism since 1780: program, myth, reality. 2sd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hroch, Miroslav (1985). Social prerequisites for national renaissance in Europe: a comparative analysis of the social composition of patriotic groups among small European nations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jouhki, Jukka (2006). Imagining the other: Orientalism and Westernism in Tamil-European relations in South India. Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä.
Larson, Gerald James (1975). “The “Bhagavad Gītā” as an intercultural process: towards an analysis of the social locations of a religious text”. Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 43(4), pages 651 to 69.
Nanda, Meera (2003). The Prophets Looking Back: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Proschan, Frank (2001). “The Squash Peoples: Imagined Ethnicities in the Southeast Asian Highlands.” Journal of Asian Studies, 60(4), pages 999 to 1032.
Sedgwick, Mark (2007). “Islamist terrorism and the “pizza effect””. Perspectives on terrorism, 1(6), p. 3–6.
Sitler, Robert K. (2012). “The 2012 phenomenon comes of age.” New religion, 16(1), pages 61 to 87.
Further reading on international electronic relations