Dinner: The Continuation Of The Total Meal

As a cultural phenomenon, dinner party can be commonly found in today's Chinese society. So far, most studies on dinner party generally view it as an established fact or even a well known "common sense". These studies mainly emphasize and demonstrate the function of dinner party in social stratum division, cultural boundaries distinguishment, social integration strengthening, and sometimes criticize the waste of resources and the violation of social justice created by dinner party. However, what a dinner party exactly is and why it is organized has not attracted the attention of these studies, neither have they stressed a wide and deep study of the elements, process and cultural significance of dinner party.Based on the problems above, this thesis maintains dinner party as its subject, tries to clarify the meaning and the origin of dinner party, and analyzes its historical change. To achieve this goal, this thesis takes a village wedding banquet as the typical case, because this banquet highlights the outstanding characteristic of presiding over an event for some special purposes and rational calculation can obviously be found in it, which is extremely consistent with the definition of dinner party identified by this thesis.With adoption of participant observation and in-depth interview and through the ethnographic description of the wedding banquet, this study maintains that this dinner party is just like a condensed ceremonial performance, during which the complex social relationship among members of a given society can be expressed concentratedly. These social activities, in the form of eating together, can be traced back to potlatch, totem meals and other kinds of meal-sharing, which could be seen as the traditional trait of dinner party. In addition, both the people who presiding over the dinner party and those who attend it have their own rational calculation and strive for interest pursuit and, in a way to speak for themselves, they jointly make the whole dinner party run successfully, which can be viewed as the modern trait of dinner party. In consequence, it is believed that dinner party, as an important way of social intercourse in modern society, is a mixture of tradition and modernity and processes duplicity. This article argues that the duplicity of dinner party comes from its change from traditional meal-sharing to modem social intercourse.In order to understand clearly the duplicity of dinner party and to see distinctly what changes have exactly happened on it, this thesis teases apart the converting process of dinner party from meal-sharing to social intercourse in the context of history and owes the prevalent of social dinner party in modern life to munificent cultural nutrition taken from traditional society. Consequently, dinner party could be viewed as the continuation of meal-sharing and becomes an important way of establishing contractual relations between individuals in modern society, in the form of meal-sharing.Both meal-sharing and dinner party adopt the form of sharing meals together, which has never changed in the process of converting from meal-sharing to dinner party. However, social conditions and social ideas behind this process have changed profoundly. Through the ethnographic description of a dinner party, this change could be seen clearly, which is of great academic value and provides a possible perspective to understand the relationship between tradition and modernity.