Menegosiasikan Kuasa Melalui Rasa: Sejarah Kuliner Sebagai Wujud Resistensi Masyarakat Lokal dalam Bayang Kolonialisme

Leo, Yohanes

Retorik: Jurnal Ilmu Humaniora
Vol 13, No 2 (2025): Cultural Studies After the End of the World

Rice has become an inseparable aspect of Indonesians, with a popular opinion that “we haven’t truly eaten, if we haven’t eaten rice.” Accompanied with a spoon and a fork, food, and how we eat have existed within a colonial construct, which doesn’t only appear in the past moment. Colonialism is produced and reproduced in social systems, education, and daily activity. Even so, that term is not merely con­structed on the normative values that reduce the community’s resistance to examining the power relationship. “It” is walking simultaneously with a resistance that puts the local knowledge in the mainstream of history—an attempt to negotiate the hegemonic cycles. The barriers between the social context and the praxis are walking “natural­ly”, making the role of each subject reciprocal. Nevertheless, the domination that appears from the Eurocentric views actually raises the local awareness against the flow in a dignified way. Through local knowledge and collective spirit, processing food becomes a local struggle to reduce the Western hegemony and revitalize the relationship between people and their connection with nature.