Fellow’s Tea with Dr Leo Mariani

Tembusu College Fellow’s Tea

Dr. Leo Mariani

4.30pm, Monday

8th September 2014

Master’s Common Lounge,

Level 3, Residential Block

Refreshments will be served.

Only 30 seats available!

Please register at tembusu.nus.edu.sg

Leo Mariani is an anthropologist . He holds a PhD from the University of Paris Descartes-Sorbonnes and is currently a F.R.S.-FNRS postdoctoral researcher at the University of Liege (Belgium). He is now in ARI-NUS as a visiting fellow for three months. He is the author of a book and several articles on Lao and Cambodian interplays. In between, he encountered a fascinating fruit: the durian. His current research thus focuses on sensory(especially olfaction) and emotional issues(especially disgust), with a comparative scope.

“I would say that the durian divides mankind into two categories”, the anthropologist Jacques Dournes claimed, those who hate it and those who love it. For Dournes, cultural relativity is the key to the problem as taste and smell result from habituation. I attempt to show that this explanation is clearly insufficient. Drawing from historical and contemporary sources (from the 16th to the 21st century), I discuss what one could call the modernization process of the durian. Put differently, I focus on the naturalization of the fruit’s smell and on the symmetrical culturalization of its taste. Concretely, this paper is the story of an encounter between Westerners and the durian. It recounts the trajectory from the fruit’s discovery by the first explorers of Southeast Asia, to the efforts that those who followed exerted to contextualize it within wider conceptions of living organisms on the one hand, and Asian otherness on the other hand.