Central Asia Workshop: Tracing Central Asian Foodways in the Arctic and Beyond

On a cold, dark day in December, I sat down to a plate of plov at <<Кафе У Тещи>> (Cafe at Your Mother-In-Law's) in Brighton Beach, a Soviet expat neighborhood in New York City. The restaurant was unlike the grandiose Russian banquet halls nearby. Cafe at Your Mother-In-Law's was instead a small, homey dive run by Korean-Uzbeks serving dishes like pickled carrots and seaweed salad alongside manti and shashlik. Korean migrants had brought their cuisine to the steppes of Central Asia, which then made it across the Atlantic Ocean to New York. But where else have Central Asia foodways traveled? It turns out, as far as the Arctic. This week, we read an article by Tatiana Argounova-Low [1], an anthropology professor at the University of Aberdeen specializing in the Russian Far East, specifically the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia). The Sakha are a Turkic people who migrated from Central Asia to Lake Baikal around 800. In the 1300s, they moved north along the Lena River to settle in northeast Russia, where they live today. The abstract for Argounova-Low's article is as follows: "This article investigates the concept of black food among the Lake Yessei Yakut in Siberia. With reference to two sources, archival records from the Russian Polar North Census of 1926–27 and contemporary fieldwork material, I investigate the local diet based on subsistence fishing and hunting and the food exchanges it entails. The article looks into changes that affected the food habits and concludes with an analysis of the social meaning of the concept of black food."