How “Natives” Ate at Colonial Exhibitions in 1889, 1900 and 1931

571522 FRC0010.1177/0957155815571522French Cultural StudiesTran research-article2015 French Cultural Studies How ‘natives’ ate at colonial exhibitions in 1889, 1900 and 1931 French Cultural Studies 2015, Vol. 26(2) 163–175 © The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0957155815571522 frc.sagepub.com Van Troi Tran Université Laval, Quebec Abstract A lot has been written on the cultural and ideological implications of French ‘human zoos’ and the ‘natives’ from the French colonies who were displayed in colonial exhibitions. Not much has been said, however, about what and how those ‘natives’ ate and drank as they were transported to Paris for the international exhibitions. In this article, I would like to draw attention to the politics of food consumption at the Paris colonial expositions of 1889, 1900 and 1931. Shared meals and official banquets were performances of colonial integration, and hygiene and food safety measures in connection with what the ‘natives’ ate and drank could be interpreted as part of the mission civilisatrice. However, I also want to show that food – exotic food – can also be an unruly object on the pacified space of the international exhibition: a generator of disgust or revulsion that may be a dissonant element within the smooth narratives of French colonialism. Keywords cannibalism, colonialism, colonial exhibitions, food, hygiene, Paris At the Paris Expositions universelles of 1889 and 1900 and the colonial exposition of 1931, ‘natives’ from the French colonies such as Indochina, Senegal, Dahomey and New Caledonia travelled to the French capital in order to bring to life the pavilions, gardens and reconstituted villages featured at these imperial exhibits. The history of these ethnographic exhibitions of colonised people has been well documented and has garnered a great deal of scholarly attention in recent decades (Leprun, 1989; Benedict, 1994; Yengoyan, 1994; Corbey, 1993; Hale, 2008; Blanchard et al., 2009; Putnam, 2012). However, a significant part of this body of scholarship on colonial exhibits has, understandably, tended to focus on their cultural aspects in order to unravel their ideological and political implications and to decode their latent if not blatant racist overtones. Conversely, not much has been said about the daily life of these human exhibits, how these ‘natives’ Corresponding author: Van Troi Tran, CELAT, Université Laval, Pavillon Charles-De Koninck, 1030 avenue des Sciences-Humaines, Local 5173, Québec, QC, G1V 0A6, Canada. Email: [email protected] Downloaded from frc.sagepub.com at Bibliotheque de l'Universite Laval on April 28, 2015 164 French Cultural Studies 26(2) ate and drank during their stay in Paris, the monitoring of their food consumption, and the meanings ascribed to their culinary practices. This article, based mainly on research into official reports of the expositions and accounts from the press, will thus explore the lively dynamics that took place at French colonial exhibits by focusing specifically on the foodways of the ‘natives’. It represents a further development from a previous work on food and foodways at the universal exhibitions of 1889 and 1900 in the context of an emerging Parisian consumer culture (Tran, 2012), and focuses this time on the Parisian official colonial exhibits of 1889, 1900 and 1931.1 It will show how food in French colonial exhibits was at the centre of a number of political issues pertaining to the French imperial discourse of the civilising mission, but not just in the obvious sense of food in a colonial context as a symbol or synecdoche of colonial power, Western imperialism or cultural Orientalism. In a more material sense, food was a mediator for the development of a colonial culture through shared meals, an object of constant tensions, interventions and negotiations in the daily governance of what the ‘natives’ were eating and drinking, and a locus of anxiety that could inspire disgust and revulsion. Food and the civilising mission In one of his many books of memoirs, writer and diplomat Paul Morand remembers that in 1900, at the universal exposition: ‘Paris belonged to the negroes [and] the yellow raw fish eaters’ (Morand, 1931a: 79). From the text one may sense that with the imminent colonial exposition in Vincennes, Morand was dreading once again a new influx of foreigners disturbing the public space with their peculiar customs. Interestingly enough, when relating his impressions of the 1931 colonial exposition, Morand expressed his fondness for the Javanese restaurant with its relaxing atmosphere at the heart of the exposition and his impression that: ‘Le Hollandais a su faire de la propreté et de l’ordre avec la pourriture et la saleté tropicales’ (Morand, 1931b: 342). As William Connolly contends, modern and secular theories of the public space often tend to ignore ‘the visceral register of subjectivity and intersubjectivity’ (Connolly 1999: 163) and (referring to Mary Douglas) thereby obviate the intuitive feelings of disgust and revulsion associated with matter that crosses the boundaries of the body. Morand’s assertions, overstated as they may be, exemplified how the viscerality of food and eating have a symbolic ability to generate discomfort and anxiety, or as Mary Douglas (1966) would put it, appear as ‘matter out of place’, like fingers in a pudding, raw-fish eaters in Paris, or, to take other examples from Parisian expos, Egyptian waiters handing cups of coffee in hands of ‘approximative cleanliness’ in 1889 (Pongin, 1893: 120), or Senegalese women selling kola nuts to wary-looking visitors in 1931, apprehensive perhaps of the bare hands handling the goods (Figure 1). Douglas’s general point is that notions of pollution are expressions of social order, and conceptions of the boundaries of the human body often share homologies with conceptions of the social body. At the expositions, food and bodies thus occupied a liminal position under the colonial gaze crystallised in the pacified scenography of the colonial sections. On the one hand, they were resources and exotic products promoted in sensuous advertisements. On the other hand, they were objects prone to pollution and impurity, sources of a pungent smell or taste, and potential repositories of germs and microbes, or anything else that might disturb the sanitised atmosphere of the ceremonial event.2 Moreover, in the French context, where cuisine, gastronomy, foodways and culinary habits have notoriously been historically central in the construction and definition of a national singularity, the foodways of the natives in Paris were an object of special scrutiny. A premise was, of course, that the ‘natives’’ contact with French food and cuisine would naturally expose them to the superiority of French civilisation, as administrators essentially saw colonial exhibits as both a representation of French colonialism in action (‘showing the colonies to the metropole’) and a performance of the Downloaded from frc.sagepub.com at Bibliotheque de l'Universite Laval on April 28, 2015 165 Tran Figure 1. Senegalese women selling kola nuts at the 1931 colonial exposition. Agence Mondial. Source: Bibliothèque Nationale de France. civilising mission (‘showing the metropole to the colonies’).3 The Parisian landscape was expected to civilise the ‘natives’ who travelled for the exhibit, and consumption itself was seen as an apprenticeship in their adaptation to the modern world.4 Gaston Bergeret’s fictive portrayal of an African of unspecified origins in his Journal d’un nègre à l’Exposition de 1900 has the main character claiming that: ‘Je n’ai pu trouver dans aucun restaurant du couscoussou, du lait de chamelle ou de l’eau-de-vie de dattes; il n’y a que du filet aux pommes et des bocks. Cela prouve que la cuisine française est la meilleure de toutes, puisque tous les peuples l’adoptent’ (Bergeret, 1901: 21). The actualisation of the civilising mission through food was not just cultural; it was also social. Meals at the colonial expositions were seen as a means to create a sense of community across the colonies through intercultural commensality. The sharing of food, as anthropologist Maurice Bloch puts it, is ‘the sharing of that which will create, or at least maintain, a common substance among those who commune together’ (1999: 133). In 1889, the ideal of colonial pacification through food was exemplified by the erection of the Fourneaux économiques, a low-cost restaurant run by the Paris Philanthropic Society and located in the Pavilion of Social Economy next to the colonial section. For two centimes, one could try a piece of bread, steak, ham, soup or a glass of wine, and, interestingly, the restaurant tables were occupied not only by visitors or workers, but also by workers from the colonies (Figure 2). Inexpensive food was the mediator of the economic and social integration of the colonised into the Republic and the commensality of the Fourneaux économiques tables could then take an active part in the universalising project of the civilising mission: ‘Naturellement, cette promiscuité de races si diverses autour d’une même table ne saurait Downloaded from frc.sagepub.com at Bibliotheque de l'Universite Laval on April 28, 2015 166 French Cultural Studies 26(2) Figure 2. Natives from various colonies having lunch at the Fourneaux économiques. In Talmeyr (1889: 45). manquer de hâter l’avènement de la grande fraternité universelle!’ (Talmeyr, 1889: 45). This is echoed in the ‘philosophy’ of the 1931 colonial exposition as expressed by its Delegate-General, Marcel Olivier, who was promoting the notion of ‘total humanity’ and a feeling of ‘solidarity across borders and races’ (1931: 280). At the 1931 exposition, more in line with the colonial philosophy of its commissioner Marshal Lyautey who advocated a politics of association between metropolitan and colonial elites, imperial commensality was celebrated at official banquets with champagne, the emblematic social cement of the political elite under the Third Republic.5 Marshal Lyautey was thus dining in the company of ‘Moroccan French with their native friends’, or celebrating with over 1200 delegates at the final banquet for the closing of the exposition the ‘association of our race’ with races ‘not inferior but different’, ‘hand in hand with other peoples’ for which France ‘paves the way towards modern civilisation’ (Le Temps, 1931). La patrie nourricière Since the ethnographic villages in fin-de-siècle expositions were advertised as windows on the daily lives of ‘natives’ in their natural settings, the issue of food was central, if only for its situation at the threshold of nature and culture. It was both a physiological need that had to be fulfilled by the administrators and a strong identity marker in the exhibition of the ‘natives’’ daily lives. Thus, feeding habits were part of the spectacle: either the Tonkinese eating rice and fish (Figure 3), or the Javanese cooking their meals (Figure 4) at the private ethnographic exhibit held by the Dutch delegation next to the French colonial section in 1889. Doctor Georges Crouigneau who visited the Javanese addressed precisely the ethnographic interest of the exhibit by describing both the culinary tools (pottery, wooden plates, a mortar) displayed in their ‘homes’, and their culinary practices: À l’Exposition, la nourriture est préparée en commun, pour tout le Kampong, sous un hangar, par les Kokki, cuisiniers. Le repas se fait dans un chaudron de cuivre, appelé dang-dang, qui est rempli au quart Downloaded from frc.sagepub.com at Bibliotheque de l'Universite Laval on April 28, 2015 167 Tran Figure 3. Dinner at the Tokinese village, 1889 In Les Merveilles de l’Exposition de 1889 (1890: Figure 11). Source: Bibliothèque Nationale de France. d’eau et dans l’intérieur duquel on suspend un panier de bambou tressé, le koukoussang, contenant du riz; quand l’eau bout, commence la cuisson du riz par la vapeur, ce qui permet à chaque grain de conserver intacte sa forme autrement agréable à la vue et au goût que l’affreuse pâtée gluante et visqueuse du riz dit crevé de nos cuisiniers européens (Crouigneau, 1890: 102–3). Much more could be said on the segregating effect of these allegedly transparent exhibits of foreign cultures for the metropolitan public and on how these scenographic devices evolved Downloaded from frc.sagepub.com at Bibliotheque de l'Universite Laval on April 28, 2015 168 French Cultural Studies 26(2) Figure 4. The kitchen at the Javanese kampong, 1889. In Fourcaud (1889: 113). throughout the history of colonial exhibitions. However, by 1931, the idea that one could gain truthful anthropological insights on other cultures by observing ‘natives’ carrying on with their ‘daily routines’ in reconstituted villages designed by French architects had lost some of its appeal. The ‘ethnographic’ dimension of the 1931 colonial exhibition was rather embodied in spectacles, rituals, ceremonies, musical performances and folkloric dances (De l’Estoile, 2007), especially as official discourses were insisting on how the life of these people ‘se rapproche plus que vous ne le croyez de la vôtre’ (Demaison, 1931: 20). Lyautey and the Delegate General Marcel Olivier were both very explicit about their intention to promote the ‘benefits’ of colonial endeavours through didactic and artistic exhibits instead of exotic entertainment. Exhibitions about food in the colonies were by then focusing much more on production (palm oil and cocoa from Togo, Cameroon and Senegal; coffee, sugar cane, chocolate and rum from Martinique and Guadeloupe; rice from Indochina) for the metropolitan market,6 than on what ‘natives’ consumed in their daily lives.7 Thus the Chocolat Ménier pavilion, the various iterations of the café maure in the Algerian, Tunisian or Moroccan sections where one could eat olive tajines and almond cakes (Leclerc, 1931: 60), or the ‘Restaurant de l’AOF’ serving exotic meals prepared by ‘les plus fins cuisiniers du Pays Noir’ (Valent, 1931: 85) all had the function of introducing new culinary cultures to the metropolitan public and, at the same time, advertising colonial products. I would, however, like to focus on something else: the material production of these human exhibits. Whereas world fairs tend to embody totalising discourses and grand narratives of modernisation or civilisation, their embodiment in the corporeal contingency of bodies that had to eat, drink and stay healthy necessitated the development of a patient architectural and organisational construction and a constant policing of bodies and things.8 As opposed to some of the private shows and exotic entertainment of the time, official exhibitions of colonised people organised by the French state consistently entailed a great number of backstage interventions such as hygiene Downloaded from frc.sagepub.com at Bibliotheque de l'Universite Laval on April 28, 2015 169 Tran regulations, medical inspections, monitoring of foodstuffs introduced on site, and the use of technical apparatus for water purification. While representations of the ‘exotic’ significantly changed over the first decades of the twentieth century – becoming less extraordinary with the growing circulation of images, products and people around the globe – one thing that remained consistent throughout the history of French official colonial expositions was an acute concern for the hygiene and cleanliness of sites advertised as the incarnation of the French civilising mission. In his report to the Under-Secretary of State to the Colonies, the director of the medical and hygiene service of the colonial section of the 1889 exposition, Dr Delaunay, specified that he visited the villages twice a day and that the feeding habits of the occupants were always the object of a ‘scrupulous examination’ (Delaunay, 1889: 4–5), to the extent that staff members were accompanying the natives in their purchases at the market and an employee was dispatched to monitor food consumption (Delaunay, 1889: 12; see Figure 5). In addition to this work of human surveillance, new technical devices were also mobilised: ‘des filtres Pasteur étaient installés à proximité de chaque village, et les indigènes, étroitement surveillés, ne consommaient que l’eau fournie par ces appareils. Des robinets d’eau de source étaient généralement installés, ce qui a permis d’éviter la fièvre typhoïde’ (Monod, 1890: 201).9 At the end of the exhibit, the rapport général boasted that the results were exceptional, especially considering the cramped space, the natives’ ‘ignorance’ of basic hygiene rules, and the ‘profound’ changes in their habits and life conditions (Picard, 1891: 368). Yet, besides judgements on the actual efficiency of the French administration in its handling of the exhibition logistics, these interventions in the management of how natives ate and drank could, and the attention given to the well-being of the ‘natives’ obviously did, help to construct an image of the French empire as a protector and provider for its colonies. Furthermore, it could also be read as a promotion for the development of colonial infrastructures.10 As a matter of fact, Delaunay’s report ended with recommendations to the colonial administration on hygiene and epidemiological matters, thereby actually turning the colonial exhibition into a laboratory from which the French political elite could draw anthropological lessons for the furthering of imperial social engineering in the colonies. In later exhibits in the interwar period, biological issues of health and hygiene not only remained a central issue – with additional measures such as vaccinations, blood tests and a battery of health checks – but also within the museography of the colonial pavilions with the exhibition of graphs, reports and new technology. This concern with hygiene increased throughout the first decades of the twentieth century with the intermingling of populations in the colonies and the colonisers’ growing awareness of the importance of environmental adaptation for the development of infrastructures. According to the Fédération française des anciens coloniaux: ‘les démonstrations d’hygiène sont devenues partie intégrante des expositions internationales’ (1931: 225). In the promotion of France as a ‘patrie nourricière’, protector, provider and moderniser of its colonies, infrastructure at colonial expositions then had a practical and rhetorical function: producing acceptable living conditions on the exposition sites and accounting for the accomplishments of the empire in the colonies in terms of modernisation and resource allocation. Perhaps in order to better highlight the humanistic goals of the Exposition coloniale, as opposed to the mercantilist shows at the Jardin d’Acclimatation, a patronising insistence was put upon the ‘natives’’ comfort in 1931: Rien n’a été négligé pour le confort de ces bons noirs. À côté des baraques qui leur servent de maisons d’habitation, ils ont un ‘salon de repos’, des bains-douches, des cuisines, un lavoir, sans oublier une douillette infirmerie pour ceux à qui ‘y en a pas bon’. (Le Matin, 1931: 1–3) It should be noted that the petit nègre expression, referring to the famous Banania slogan, further accentuated the already paternalistic tone of this description. Downloaded from frc.sagepub.com at Bibliotheque de l'Universite Laval on April 28, 2015 170 French Cultural Studies 26(2) Figure 5. Javanese women at the market in the morning, accompanied by a guard. In Deste (1889: 537). Source: Bibliothèque Nationale de France. ‘Native’ accounts of their nutritional experience at the colonial expositions are predictably very scarce, but the few available testimonies published in the daily press also emphasised the living conditions provided by the French administrators. In 1889, a letter written by an Okanda pirogue chief, M’Bengo, to his brother in Odembe in Congo, expressed great satisfaction with the living conditions provided for his delegation at the Exposition universelle: Dis à tous les Okandas, qui nous conseillaient de ne pas aller si loin, que, malgré tout ce qu’ils pensaient, le voyage s’est très bien passé, et personne n’a été malade. Et tout le monde est bien content ici. Et nous mangeons de la viande tous les jours. (Bulletin officiel de l’Exposition universelle de 1889, 1889) Meat, as a symbol of comfort and prosperity, was evoked once again in 1931 in the account of a Sudanese woman interviewed about her first impressions of France a few days after her arrival in France right before the opening of the colonial exposition: Bonne nourriture! … Viande meilleure que là-bas … Plus abondante … Bons poissons aussi … Mais pas farine de manioc [sic] … À la place, riz, pommes de terres, pois cassés, tomates … Et du piment … Et de l’huile! (Le Matin, 1931: 3) Downloaded from frc.sagepub.com at Bibliotheque de l'Universite Laval on April 28, 2015 171 Tran The real conditions of the ‘natives’ enrolled for the show in Paris were of course far from being as idyllic as this account may imply (see Hodeir, 1995), but this insistence on well-being was a way of highlighting the humanistic aspects of colonisation as theorised by Lyautey in the interwar period: well-nourished natives would testify to the importance of the empire’s mission as provider and moderniser of the colonies. Culinary disruptions and cannibal pollutions in the public space of the Republic As both a laboratory for colonial social engineering and a public stage that could be re-appropriated by delegates from the colonies,11 issues such as food and its allocation at colonial exhibits could also be an object of tension and dissension. The importance put upon the living conditions of the ‘natives’ by the various exposition administrations was perhaps a sign that the French authorities anticipated scandal and demonstrations if their ‘natives’ on display were malnourished. As it happened, in the summer of 1889, a group of Egyptian donkey-drivers went on strike for precisely that reason: ‘Ils se trouvaient mal nourris et voulaient assommer – une vraie grève quoi – leur chef d’équipe, et pendant son déjeuner, ce qui est une revanche comme une autre’ (Anry, 1889: 126). The group even found support in the columns of La Bataille, the newspaper edited by the communard Prosper-Olivier de Lissigaray, who called their employer a ‘Barnum who feeds them badly and pays them even worse’ (quoted in Le Courrier Quotidien de l’Exposition de 1889, 1889). But an even more interesting case was that of the Kanaks, because of the difficulties of integrating them in the official narrative of the mission civilisatrice by virtue of the popular perceptions associating them with backwardness, savagery and of course cannibalism. As constructions of figures of the ‘native’ by colonial authorities are often multilayered and oscillating between a temporal othering of non-Western cultures and a universalist project of civilisational progress, debates around ‘cannibal’ exhibits in 1889 and 1931 helped crystallise contradictions between different versions of the primitive other. It must be noted here that none of the official colonial expositions in Paris featuring New Caledonian actors actually advertised the Kanaks on display as cannibals. Even though colonial exhibits did feature a greater dose of exotic entertainment and eye-catching orientalism than the administrators would admit, exhibitions of radical culinary otherness such as cannibalism could not fit well into the official narratives of French colonialism. In 1931, Lyautey refused to host traditional ethnographic villages at the exposition and even denounced the private ‘human exhibit’ of ‘cannibals’ from New Caledonia brought in Paris by the Fédération française des anciens coloniaux for an exhibition at the Jardin d’Acclimatation in the Bois de Boulogne (for their story, see Dauphiné, 1997). The New Caledonian exhibit at the 1931 exposition was following a museological model explicitly advocated by Lyautey for the design of colonial pavilions: a main building of traditional ‘authentic’ architecture hosting an exhibition of dioramas, artefacts and documents testifying to the progress made by the colony since the establishment of French rule (Demaison, 1931: 51). Nevertheless, during the expositions, the daily press and illustrated journals such as the Journal Amusant or La Caricature were filled with cartoons and fictional stories of all sorts relating the misadventures of ‘cannibals’ visiting the capital as actors for ethnographic shows. A striking feature of these cartoons, however, is that the satire and ridicule was, more often than not, turned against the attitude of the Parisians. Accordingly, in 1889, tirades against the ignorance and the rough behaviour of the public visiting the ‘natives’ were a much more prevalent topic of indignation in journalistic accounts than the alleged savageness of the primitives. One of the most vocal denunciations of the public’s behaviour came from the pen of the journalist and playwright CharlesLucien Huard who stated in the Livre d’or of the 1889 international exhibition: Downloaded from frc.sagepub.com at Bibliotheque de l'Universite Laval on April 28, 2015 172 French Cultural Studies 26(2) Personnellement, je n’aime pas beaucoup, pas du tout même, ces exhibitions de coloniaux que notre gouvernement a fait venir de très loin, pour les donner en pâture à la risée publique, à l’éternelle et écœurante blague des Parisiens … Par exemple, de loin on les apostrophe de toutes les façons, et toute la journée des gens spirituels, abrités derrière les palissades, les appellent : mauricaud, chocolat, boule de neige, et quand un monsieur s’est ingénié à dire en nègre à l’un d’eux: ‘Toi bien vouloir boulotter petit blanc’, tous les imbéciles qui l’entourent se tordent de rire, et pour un peu le porteraient en triomphe. (Huard, 1889b: 481, italics added) Cannibalism reversed. And, quite interestingly, Huard, when commenting on the ethnographic villages at the 1889 colonial exhibition, evoked the ‘naturals from different countries, French subjects coloured liquorice, chocolate or cinnamon’ (Huard, 1889a: 11). It was the Kanaks and the other humans on display from the colonies who were apparently subjected to the public’s visual appetite for human flesh. While the artificial production of a mythology of cannibalism can obviously serve colonial ideologies by generating representations of savagery and backwardness, accounts from the French international expositions of the colonial era, from the journalistic indignations in 1889 to Lyautey’s disapproval of the human exhibits of cannibals in 1931, seem to show that these figures of radical (culinary) otherness were rather marginalised in official representations of the ‘natives’. Discourses on cannibals and cannibalism at colonial expositions are interesting precisely because they uncovered confrontations with visceral reactions to radical culinary otherness. Put otherwise, in the symbolic order of the official French colonialist discourse, the figure of the cannibal was precisely ‘matter out of place’, polluting and poisoning the Republican public space and the universalist narrative of the civilising mission in its different incarnations, from the end of the nineteenth century to the interwar period. By 1931, at a time when colonialist authorities were banqueting with the local elite, promoting products from overseas, introducing Algerian and Indochinese cuisines to the metropolitan public and developing infrastructure for water distribution in Asia and Africa, cannibal exhibitions were understandably seen as an anomaly. Between integration and resistance I have attempted in this article to explore the tension between the integration of food and foodways in official colonial representations broadcast during international exhibitions and the emergence of food as a potential object of resistance and disruption in the Republican public space. In the context of French colonial exhibitions, food was mediating the commercial, cultural, social and bio-political integration of the colonies through advertisements, shared meals and hygiene measures. Food produces social exclusion as well as inclusion. The variety of actions taken for the monitoring of what ‘natives’ ate and drank could thus be interpreted as efforts to expel objects of disgust, in order to showcase official representations of the empire. At the same time, however, food can also be an uncooperative object that precisely calls these representations into question, as the staging of culinary exoticism at the expositions could be problematic for the authorities when the display of ‘exotic’ culinary customs was incongruous with the higher goals ascribed to the organisation of French colonial expositions. Notes 1. Some facts: the colonial section of the 1889 universal exposition was located on the eastern half of the Esplanade des Invalides. The event attracted over 32 million visitors. The Trocadero mound hosted the colonial pavilions at the 1900 universal exposition, which attracted over 50 million visitors. The 1931 colonial exposition, commissioned by Marshal Lyautey, was held in Vincennes, around the Lac Downloaded from frc.sagepub.com at Bibliotheque de l'Universite Laval on April 28, 2015 173 Tran Daumesnil. It attracted over 30 million visitors. In this article, I chose not to take into account the Marseille exhibitions of 1906 and 1922, which were much smaller in scale and attracted 1.8 million and 3 million visitors respectively. 2. Janes (2010) has analysed the different measures used to alleviate feelings of disgust toward exotic food at the 1931 exposition restaurants, mainly through the framing of colonial dishes in a more familiar meal structure for French guests. 3. ‘Les organisateurs de l’exposition coloniale avaient, dans la conception de leur œuvre, obéi à une double préoccupation: ils avaient voulu montrer les colonies à la France et montrer la France aux coloniaux’ (Monod, 1890: 139). 4. Émile Monod, musing on the moral impact of the colonial exhibit, expressed this perfectly: Arrivés pieds nus, ils sont repartis goûtant les bienfaits d’une paire de souliers qui protège leurs extrémités endolories ; ils ont appliqué leur goût du clinquant et de la verroterie à l’achat de bibelots de notre industrie nationale, de spécimens variés de coutellerie dont ils sont grands amateurs ; quoiqu’on leur ait dispensé avec ménagement leur solde, ils ont été à même d’avoir en mains des espèces monnayées ; ils ont établi par eux-mêmes une proportionnalité entre les pièces de billon d’argent ou d’or et les marchandises qu’ils convoitaient ou qu’ils achetaient. C’est donc une école profitable qu’ils ont suivie, au point de vue de leurs transactions. Leur goût du travail y gagne, et l’œuvre de moralisation essayée à l’Exposition coloniale n’aura pas été un vain mot. (Monod, 1890: 120) 5. See Guy (1999) on the role of champagne in political rituals. 6. Lemaire (2004) develops a detailed analysis of the commercial propaganda for colonial products at the 1931 colonial exposition. 7. Although at the 1937 international exposition in Paris a tourist guide claimed that at the Cambodian restaurant: ‘it will be possible for you to see them eat pungent dishes out of little bowls and tiny cups, as if in the presence of the travelling soup merchants of the Far East’ (quoted in Ezra, 2000: 36). 8. And this is still the case: on the politics of food at the Shanghai World Expo, see Tran (2014). 9. The Delaunay report states that ‘pendant ce long espace de six mois, pas un cas de fièvre typhoïde, pas un cas de maladie attribuable à l’impureté des eaux de consommation n’ont pu être relevés’ (Delaunay, 1889: 12). 10. See Bloom (2008: 95–123) on the political aspect of health and hygiene in French colonialism. 11. See Lüsebrink (2003) on African intellectuals at the 1931 colonial exposition. References Anry H (1889) Une rue au Caire. 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Yengoyan A (1994) Culture, ideology and world’s fairs: colonizer and colonized in comparative perspective. In: RW Rydell and NE Gwinn (eds) Fair Representations: World’s Fairs and the Modern World. Amsterdam: VU University Press, pp. 62–83. Author biography Van Troi Tran is a Lecturer and Research Assistant in Ethnology at the Université Laval in Quebec City. He is the author of Manger et boire aux expositions universelles: Paris, 1889 et 1900 (2012) and has also published a number of articles on world’s fairs in journals such as Ethnologie française, Food and Foodways, Journal of Consumer Culture and Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory. His research interests include the anthropology of globalisation, food and foodways, economic anthropology and the history of consumption. He is also currently serving as president of the Folklore Studies Association of Canada. Downloaded from frc.sagepub.com at Bibliotheque de l'Universite Laval on April 28, 2015