식공간의 구조적 이해 I

A Semiotic Approach to Dietary Life Spaces 1 : Food-to-Food Communication

The foods and drinks and dietary life spaces are not only material things but mental or spiritual ones. The foods and drinks are not freely distributed on the table but associated each other following the rule which an anthropological society has made for its dietary culture. I investigate this dietary life space rule of Korean home table menu. Firstly, I explain my scientific point of view and structuralist method. Like language, man grows up with foods and dies with. We cannot accumulate sufficiently such kind of data because of its deductive character which make us to give firstly a perspective and criteria for finding its structure. I reduce dietary life to home table and its foods and driks. In this reduction, home table menu is regarded as a sociolect on which Roland Barthes has already explained in his System de la Mode. The Korean home table menu compose of boiled rice, soup, side dishes, stew, fried or baked foods and drinking water. These dietary elements of Korean table make together binary system of /dried/ vs /watery/ and /hot/ vs /cold/. The boiled rice is dried and hot, the soup is watery and hot, the side dishes are dried and cold. The stew and the fried or baked foods are mediators for these elements. The stew is less watery than soup and neutralizes some roles of side dishes and soup. For the other hand, the fried or baked foods which have a character of dried but hot neutralize some roles of side dishes. That is to say, they neutralize the elementary-binary system of boiled rice, soup and side dishes. Korean domestic dietary life space is a system where all the elements have its function each other. If some foods or drinks penetrate in this system and continue to resist to some function of the system, Korean dietary life space could change. On the other hand, the vessels are more sensible to the change than foods and drinks. Korean vessels (and bowls) have for a long time represented their psychological power with dimension(height and width). Korean traditional rice and soup's bowl were higher than others. But today, their dimension became small as opposed to those of side dishes. These side dishes' vessels became wider than before in the same manner of the stew's and the fried foods'. It seems that this phenomenon represent a democratic aspect of Korean eating culture today. The Korean system of domestic dietary vessels is characterized by its width. I deduce this conclusion, with the structural perspective and my inference, from inductive cases' data. These would be corroborated and corrected by a posteriori studies.