ABSTRACT
The wedding cake, whether ‘traditional’ or in new styles, is no ordinary object. Mary Douglas picked it out in a lecture in 1974 as conspicuously likely to attract the attention of ‘a competent young anthropologist arriving on this planet from Mars’. At the weddings to which he was likely to be invited he would, she suggested with an exaggeration which is almost legitimate, ‘be perhaps baffled to make up his mind whether the central focus of the ceremony was the marriage or the cake’. In the same vein she asserted that the ceremonial of kava in the island of Tonga or tea in Japan ‘would pale into insignificance compared with the ceremonial surrounding the cutting and distribution of the wedding cake’ (Douglas 1982:105). The extent to which such claims are justified will emerge in succeeding chapters; immediately however, it is clear that she was correct and perceptive in picking out the cake, as extraordinary as it is familiar, as a prime object for study.
