Matters of Muslim Menus, Meals and Manners: Foreign Foods and Formation and Alteration of Argobba Alimentation

Abstract

Muslim Argobba alimentation and culinary customs are anchored by the social aspects of menus, meals and manners, and by the  composition of ingredients and preparation and processing methods, and commensality and boundary relationships. They also reflect  variation in food preferences and their formation and alteration due to contact with foreign foods coming both from within and outside  Argobba escarpment habitats. Muslim Argobba cooking and cuisine thus requires no temporal guidance because grain and legume foods, for example, result from complicated and fragile fermentations, involve delicate preparations and must be made at specific times  of the year if they are to succeed. However, the Muslim Argobba do not limit themselves to a formal calendar because they combine  climatic and seasonal conditions, and all indigenous knowledge into an annual plan of agricultural tasks. Thus, food products that will  keep for longer and shorter periods of time figure significantly and local meal patterns make time for indigenous culinary contexts and  also respond to hegemonic pressures pilling from Argobba involvement in trade and wage labour in towns. This article examines the cultural assumptions and social practices through which these food identities are constructed and how in turn they inform the  production, distribution, preparation and consumption of foods. It looks at household practices by comparing towns and rural settings  because the structure of Argobba household time related to food habits depends above all on the length and combination of the  undertakings. It explores how the scale and scope of the current condition of Argobba alimentation is in the process of erosion and alteration due to contact with neighbouring Amhara, Oroomo and Afar foodways, caused by the introduction of foreign foods and  seemingly by the reorientation of trade trails and modern markets and marts related to changing commercial currents, and  entrepreneurial and wage labour engagements in north-eastern Šäwa and south-eastern Wällo.