Pata Negra

Summertime is not only sausage-grilling season here, but seems to focus upon cured meats, as well, perhaps because of the picnic menu. At anyrate, Michael and I discovered Pata Negra
a cured ham made of the black pigs of Spain who feast on special diet of chestnuts and grass.
We were attracted to this man's slicing directly off a cured leg:

We're talking hoof

It had a beefy texture with belts of fat running through it. We regret never having been to Spain, despite the fact that our deepest friendships here have been with Spanish folk who form a second-class citizen status here, dominating the service wing of Switzerland's hospitality industry.

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Sometimes diverse groups inhabit a common world via a shared marginal status: foreigners, Christians, economic underdog. Etrangers is often translated "outsider" or "stranger" as in Camus' famous story, a staple of French studies. It can mean alien or gaijin (Japanese) or gentile, in English Bible translations of non-Israel. In its most brutal 20th century, nationalist form - where people, land, culture coincided - these labels also marked the non-human, the contaminated, ie Jews.

Sometimes premodern worlds marked the non-human by class or work station, as the buraku, a non-ethnic "people" in the Japanese Edo period (1600-1870) whose labor involved the shedding of blood (leatherwork, butchery), a religious taboo.

We live in a time which celebrates difference - in contrast to equality defined as sameness in early modernity, as in Marx. Not too long ago it seems, minorities were "invisible" - now they're everywhere. Colonialism complicates these shifts and Camus was, like Jacques Derrida, French Algerian.

***

Some of these tensions are tapped here by the Swiss People's Party (SVP); quite vocal & the largest party, the SVP houses Euroskeptics and anti-immigration sentiment. These signs are everywhere:

"Stop Massive Immigration"

- a petition seeking 100K signatures to put anti-immigration measures on the next referendum. While some of the ads are poisonous, many people are sympathetic to a loss in Swiss identity; most immigrants being Muslim.

Although the country has an exceptional number of foreigners - almost 20% of the total population - they draw attention (touch a nerve?) to the secular nature of Swiss society, representing a threat to a culture that modern Swiss (and Europeans) have abandoned - or been abandoned by. Modernity marginalizes everyone in different ways; the secular have the political high ground but a hollowed tradition; the religious a cultural legacy without form.

We are from a 1st world nation in a privileged role here, in our betwixt position. Europeans, especially Swiss, still think more tribally, wanting to know, for example, upon meeting me, where I'm from; never quite satisfied with the "from America" response. In this context, I'm reminded how crucial Asia was/is in shaping European identity, its historical Other.

On the other hand, in the States, I'm taken aback when some do not "see" me at all; accepted & equal, but effaced of any cultural marker; one of us. Whatever than means.