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Ethnography: ODE TO THE FRIDGE

Modernity has produced many altars: indispensible sites that form part of a sedentary individual’s rituals and folklores. They are there embedded into what is generally referred to as ‘everyday’. If there is one altar that has quietly choreographed the city dweller’s domestic time frame, it has to be the fridge. A pilgrimage to one’s white cube make up fleeting moments of any given day, but are important albeit uncritical liminal spaces of decision making. ‘What will I take from the fridge to cook or eat?’ or, ‘What will I put in it?’ I have actually caught myself more than once opening my own fridge without doing anything, just for the sake of looking at it. Ritual and folklore does not merely belong to remote tribes, it is part of the #commons. The problem is we (including me) were trained from our previous generations schools to regard ritual and folklore as exotica. I had to unlearn (and still do) it through a series of ‘touching’ experiences (more stories of these later).

Fridge could be sacred. It has to be if we have it. The moment one opens its door, light from within illuminates the face of the hungry. Then, devotion begins as one decides to make something out of what is found, or what has been earlier set-up, thanks to visits to another sacred site: the supermarket. The consumer, faced with an immediate need (hunger or socializing) becomes an instant priest, shaman or alchemist until his / her needs are satisfied.

In ritual-making processes of many indigenous communities in the Philippines that I have met, food (including liquids and funky roots and ‘herbs’) are important elements that shamans use as tools for ceremonialising. The contemporaneity that one arrives at though cooking, not to mention, the satisfaction that is acquired from the performance of preparing, behaving around, sharing and tasting (Kirshenbaltt-Gimblett) these consumables nourishes the overall texture of the happening. They activate social spaces of negotiation and interaction, between human to human, and human to beyond human. Food is the shaman’s cyborgial tool to access the sacred. And if ethnography is critically resituated into our own lives, one of the most urgent point of inquiry has to be the fridge. It is a basic altar of our choices. Choices, including the choice to have a fridge, must be sacred. Otherwise, we are merely ‘wasting’ time and our fridge merely becomes a well coordinated waiting room for the waste basket.

Three years has passed since a humble project of cooking with other people’s leftovers have turned into Nowhere Kitchen, a living school rehearsing tasty sustainabilities. I have seen many fridges, as I had the privilege to occupy many strangers’ kitchens (many have become and remained friends) and gossip / make ritual devotion into their private altars. Here I learned of the fridge’s influence to designs of living. Its configuration, like how most of the city life is designed is based on ideas of the individual, the packed, the partitioned, the segregated, the private and the distancing: my food, my groceries, my portions, my, my, my, my etc. The compartmentalized patterns of city living cause for isolation and alienation. No one wants to cook for two hours and eat for 15 minutes. It breeds another kind of segregatory consumption: also known as ‘eating out’. So eating in is ordinary, and eating out is special. Yet, we could change this simply by transforming the way we mean by what we mean.

I don’t think the fridge (as it is now) is the religion of the future, nor compartmentalized living, nor giant supermarkets. But while it is still there, we might as well cook what is there. And while we’re on it, use the opportunity to invite some people over and transform it into a simple event. It is about subtly making this act of ‘getting together’ happen and gracefully repeating it as a regular (not specialized) ritual that makes the difference. After all, the powerful indigenous shamanic rituals that we tend to exoticize didnt evolve overnight, they were being rehearsed for thousands of years in the everyday. We only witness the show, and not the process. So we better start now. What’s on your fridge? ;)

- P.D.

Revised from a post originally published in Tea-tron, 11 January 2013