Feasting and the Practice of Stately Manners

Abstract

The essays in this volume on “culinary equipment” give cause to celebrate; indeed, they comprise a little feast of their own! Here is a timely venue that rescues ceramic assemblages from their century-long appointment as chronometric indicators and puts them firmly back into the hands of people, connects them to their intended contextual functions. This discussion offers us a chance to revisit the idea of the political meal as a marked event in people’s everyday lives, and (more the focus of these brief comments) to see it as a social practice and process which, in its regular reiteration, creates and renews the very context that it serves.