Weekly Assignment 7 ANTH 310
For this assignment, you will be reading an article on bakeries.
Once you have read the content, in one full paragraph, tell me (in three sentences minimum) one specific
thing that you learned from the article. In your second paragraph, tell me some specific information that
you would have liked to have seen discussed further in the article (in three sentences minimum). Then,
choose 5 vocabulary terms from chapter 8 notes.
Explain each of these vocabulary words in an anthropological way (defining each term in your own
words, not directly from the notes) in relationship to the article. Each vocabulary word should be defined
in one sentence and each relationship in another sentence. Make sure each of your examples comes
directly from the article on bakeries only!
Your assignment should be typed, spell-checked, written in full sentences, and should be turned in for full
credit by 8am March 6 to the Canvas dropbox. Check your syllabus for the tardy policy. This is worth 25
points.
https://www.bonappetit.com/story/filipino-pop-up-bakeries-social-media
There Are 10,000 People Waiting for These Filipino Doughnuts. That’s No Surprise.
Social media has not only created a huge customer base for a new group of Filipino pop -up bakeries
but provided a platform to watch this evolution of Filipino baking in real time.
B Y J A S M I N E T I N G April 7, 2021
Photo By Kenneth Camara / Courtesy KORA
It was 4 a.m. by the time chef Kimberly Camara finished transforming her New York City apartment into
a makeshift bakery for Kora, her Filipino doughnut shop. She’d spent the last two days prepping dough,
fillings, and glazes, and on this sleepy Friday last fall she pulled out folding tables stored underneath the
couch and plugged in two small fryers. While she waited for the rest of her team to arrive—her mother,
brother, and cousin—she and her partner, Kevin Borja, rolled and shaped the doughnuts on the folding
tables. Altogether, they fried, glazed, and boxed about 500 doughnuts for customers to pick up. And while
that may seem like a lot of doughnuts, this barely makes a dent in Kora’s nearly 10,000-person waitlist.
“It’s daunting,” Camara says. After she and Borja were laid off from their jobs—a research development
cook and a server at Union Square Hospitality Group, respectively—back in March, Camara cobbled
together leftover ube pastry cream and brioche dough and sold them as doughnuts via Instagram. “There
was no monetary motivation behind it,” she says. “It was literally just like, I want to do something.” She
thought they’d be doing this for about a month, but now a year later, they’re trying to keep up with the
staggering number of orders they’ve gotten. Recently they opened their own commissary space to keep up
with their never-ending orders.
Kora cofounders Kimberly Camara and Kevin Borja
Photo By Kenneth Camara / Courtesy KORA
The Pili & J from Kora, a brioche doughnut filled with pili nut mousseline and mora jam
Photo By Kenneth Camara / Courtesy KORA
While business for delivery apps has more than doubled during the pandemic, Instagram has become a
source for takeout. The Kora team was shocked by how fast their following grew. But they weren’t
surprised that people were interested in Filipino flavors. “I think society has become more open to trying
things because of the internet, honestly,” Camara says. “Obviously, ube is one of the main things that
people are so excited about, just because it’s purple and tastes great. I see a lot of Filipino cuisine being
hailed and sought out.”
Kora is one of several new Filipino online pop-up bakeries slammed with overwhelming demand. The
Dusky Kitchen and JEJOCA, both located in New York City, have consistently sold out of Filipino
sweets sampler boxes within a day or two of opening up online orders. The team behind Salamat
Cookies in Indianapolis received double the orders they expected in their first week in business last May.
Now, 24,200 cookies later, Salamat has registered as an LLC, launched an official website, and is looking
into renting a commercial kitchen. In Milpitas, California, chef Francis Sibal started Kuya Pields in
response to the popularity of the baked goods he made and donated to frontline workers at the hospital
where his sister works. “People were too embarrassed to say, ‘Hey, could I just buy it?’ knowing this
whole thing was for the front liners,” he says. “I didn’t plan to start a business. It all just happened.”
And it’s happening now—with a lot of chefs out of work and able to dedicate their skills and time to more
personal projects; home bakers ready to take their hobby to the next level; and so many of us stuck at
home, on our phones, and in search of something soothing, scintillating, and sweet. All this has led to the
current Filipino baking evolution we’re seeing right now on social media.
Baking has long been a part of the Philippine culinary canon, reflecting a history of cultural melding. In
precolonial times, with the influence of Malay ancestors, natives made cakes out of sticky rice and
coconut milk. In a 16th century account, Italian historian Antonio Pigafetta described kakanin—the
general name for Filipino rice cakes wrapped in banana leaves and given to the Spanish as gifts—as
“resembling sugar loaves, while others were made in the manner of tarts with eggs and honey.” Philippine
food historian Doreen Fernandez noted in her book Palayok that there were so many variations of
kakanin, specifically subtly sweet baked bibingka and fluffy steamed puto, that written records from
Spanish missionaries couldn’t capture how rich the baking tradition had been.
The Spanish government established the first bread bakery in the Philippines around 1631, and pandesal
was born. It was initially made out of wheat flour, tough and crusty like a French baguette. But because
the Philippines wasn’t big on wheat production, bakers eventually turned to weaker flours made of lowprotein wheat, like all-purpose or cake flour, which led to the pillowy, bread-crumb-dusted rolls Filipinos
know today. “It is the bread of our history, at the core of our culture, at the heart of our tastes,” Fernandez
writes of pandesal. “It is brown and plain like the Filipino, good by itself or alone, crisp on the outside
and soft on the inside. It is good, basic and strong—just the way we are, and would like the nation to be.”
As Filipino immigrants moved to the U.S., they brought with them these baking traditions. Step into any
Little Manila, and you’ll easily find a bakery mainstay with soft pandesal; ensaymada, cheese-topped
brioche rolls; chiffon cupcakes known as mamon; dacquoise-like cakes with layers of buttercream,
meringue, and cashews aptly dubbed sans rival; brazo de mercedes, a fleecy meringue roll filled with
custard; and all kinds of colorful kakanin. Some of these bakeries have become household
names. Philippine Bread House in Jersey City, New Jersey, has been around since the 1970s and is
beloved for its ube-flavored Swiss rolls and mango sponge cakes. Since its founding in 1979, Valerio’s
City Bakery has grown into a mini-chain with four locations in California, all doling out hot pandesal and
white loaves swirled with ube, cheese, or mongo (red mung bean).
Blood orange and dark chocolate sponge cake with a coffee-coconut-chestnut cream filling and
cardamom- and cinnamon-spiced Swiss meringue
Photo By Jessica Joan Causing
Jessica Causing, owner of JEJOCA online bake shop
Photo Courtesy Jessica Joan Causing
Jessica Causing was inspired by her great-aunt’s 40-year-old bakery Gemmae Bake Shop in Long Beach,
California, when she started her own online bakery JEJOCA, which is currently on hiatus. Gemmae’s is
renowned for its ensaymada, pandesal, and bibingka, but over the years it’s also added items that combine
Filipino flavors with American baking traditions, like mango cream cheesecake and ube pistachio tart. “I
grew up eating a lot of Gemmae’s stuff,” Causing says. “That collaboration between the flavors and the
baked goods definitely inspired me.”
Even as food with Filipino ingredients became more widely available (Trader Joe’s ube waffles!), baked
goods stayed mostly within the Filipino community. But with the rise of Instagram bakeries and other
online platforms during the pandemic, more people are actively seeking out these treats.
When food writer Kiera Wright-Ruiz saw photos of the Dusky Kitchen’s pandan polvorón, Filipino
shortbread, she knew she just had to try them. To her, they seemed like the “ultimate gift” at the end of a
long day during the pandemic. “Something that draws me to Filipino flavors, in particular, is the merger
of cultures,” she explains, “I’m half-Latinx and half-Asian. So in general, it’s just really interesting for me
to see ingredients or dishes that I know from the Latinx angle and see how that has been translated to
Filipino culture.”
“They were unlike anything I had ever seen,” says EmJ Hova, a private tutor who discovered Kora on
social media. “The doughnuts looked like a work of art. The vibrancy of the colors, the flavors, and just
the story that Kim was bringing with her Filipino history and her grandmother, everything spoke [to me].”
After pining over the doughnuts for months, she and her partner got their first Kora box last fall. “I was
marveling at the fact that you can make a doughnut that doesn’t involve chocolate or sprinkles or just
plain custard. Everything was so unique and special.”
Filipino flavors and ingredients stand out in the landscape of beige baked goods on our Instagram feeds,
which is part of the reason why Camara thinks they do so well on the platform. “I’m not surprised,” she
says. “You can’t help but notice that vibrant purple hue when scrolling through your feed.”
Part of this is thanks to the ripple effect of the Filipino diaspora. During the earlier months of COVID-19
lockdown, my TikTok feed was filled with videos of home bakers based in the Philippines making ubecheese pandesal and posting themselves tearing apart the bun to reveal a cheesy center. Sibal says that
watching this pushed him to begin baking in the first place for frontline workers. Before the pandemic,
Sibal was used to cooking a variety of international cuisines as a company chef at Google HQ, but Kuya
Pields allowed him to focus on the food he grew up with.
Abi Balingit of the Dusky Kitchen
Photo By Jason Dessalet
Passion fruit and sesame seed Pocky sticks from the Dusky Kitchen’s Christmas Pasalubong tins.
Photo By Abi Balingit
Meanwhile, home bakers used this time to experiment and do something new. The Dusky Kitchen was
always something ad operations manager Abi Balingit hoped to do but only now found the bandwidth to
make strawberry and pandan polvorón; linzer cookies inspired by turon, banana spring rolls; and pumpkin
pie hopia, a moon cake–like pastry influenced by Fujianese immigrants to the Philippines.
After watching the rise of these bakeries on Instagram and TikTok over the past several months, I’ve
realized that I, and millions of others around the world, have had front-row seats for something special
unfolding before our eyes. We’ve witnessed the continued ingenuity of Filipino bakers, and in turn, the
evolution of Filipino baked goods, using traditional Filipino ingredients and modern baking techniques.
And now there is an audience beyond the Filipino community for these baked goods.
“Doughnuts are the vessel that we’ve chosen to introduce these flavors to people who don’t already know
about them,” Borja says. Camara says that they hope to venture beyond doughnuts and desserts to offer a
full Filipino dining experience inspired by her grandma’s recipes.
“I feel like I was destined to do something with this apartment because it’s in the middle of Little Manila,
with all the Filipino community and the resources available to me,” Camara says. “Filipino cuisine is so
rich, and we want to explore that richness.”
ANTH 310 Chapter 8: Marriage and Families
When we talk about family, we try to divide our relatives into different categories depending on
exactly who we are to them, and they are to us. If an individual is considered a blood relative of any type,
we call them consanguineal kin; this would include your biological parents, children, even people who
share just a little bit of your DNA such as half siblings. On the other hand, relatives that are somehow
legally part of your family are known as affinal kin. When you marry in the United States, most times
you are not marrying someone who shares your blood, but you might, like a second cousin (some states
allow for marriages between first cousins: now before you get all squicky about that, there are no obvious
mutations guaranteed unless the problems are already in the DNA; marrying first cousins DOES NOT
CAUSE the mutation, it simply brings the existing mutation to fruition). Affinal kin includes people who
are related to your spouse, children you adopt or foster, anyone whom the law considers to be legally
related to you.
Your kin group means all the people who exist today (and sometimes includes all the ancestors
on both sides of your family as well) who are your relatives, even if that means people you have never
met in your life. I have cousins on my father’s side (he comes from a family of 8 siblings), and not only
have I not met their children, but I have also never met them. I know I have relatives from my mom’s side
in the Philippines who are part of my kin group, and my mom keeps trying to explain exactly how they’re
related to all of us, and I have no idea who they are. Honestly, I am grateful for the internet so I can keep
track of some of them. One problem is that we use terms like Tita that means auntie, so for the longest
time, I thought I had literally dozens of aunts, but none of them are related to me through law or blood.
We further divide family into how physically close they are to us, sometimes within a specific
household. That brings us back to the previous chapter with social distance. Physical distance does not
guarantee a direct relationship with social distance. You can share a household with people who are not
very nice, so no one should expect you to maintain small social distance with them. As we know, family
does not guarantee a respectful, loving relationship.
The nuclear family traditionally includes parents and their children, and of course, that includes
single parent households as well. An extended family means expanding across generations. This includes
relatives both horizontally (your same generation means your cousins) and vertically
(grandparents/aunts/uncles/parents/children/grandchildren/bonus relatives who cook well).
Now sometimes we have people in our lives who are not blood relatives OR affinal kin, but we
claim them as family members, and we refer to these people as fictive kin. My partner and I claim our
cats as our family, although we do not include their photo in holiday cards. Sometimes best friends can be
considered your family as well. Back to my mom, we call her best friend Aunt Mona and Mona’s husband
Uncle Joe even though, to my knowledge, we are not blood related at all. They are best friends because
their mothers were best friends, a lovely intergenerational relationship, but I am not close with their
children since they are older than I am. We certainly find lots of fictive kin in sororities and fraternities as
well as other organizations such as the Big Brothers/Big Sisters.
In traditional cultures around the world, there is great pressure to ensure the safety of a village,
and that role culturally tends to fall to the men, especially in the role of warriors. To train the boys to
become these strong leaders, many cultures in Africa, Southeast Asia and South America create men’s
houses. There are none in the U.S. or Europe. This means that boys, some as young as 5-6 years old, will
move away from their mothers and begin secret training in the art of becoming a man and protecting a
village. He will never be among strangers, though, since his older brothers, father, cousins, uncles,
grandfathers and other male relatives and neighbors will be there every step of the way. In addition, he
will be raised in a peer group, meaning that he will always have other boys his age, which is important
because: a) he will start bonding at a young age with boys who will group up to be his support group and,
b) he will have decades to learn to work with other boys to learn the complicated skills required in his
community. Here is a link to a site in Palau (in Micronesia in the South Pacific) to better understand the
architecture there: https://www.everyculture.com/No-Sa/Palau.html
We do NOT have men’s houses in the United States at all: we do not have any parallel. Students
ask, “But what about all boy’s schools?” This is not a men’s house since the boys can tell their female
relatives what they learn in school, and they are not raised only by adults to whom they are related.
At some point after successfully leaving the men’s house, the young men will marry. While we
usually do not think of this aspect of marriage in the United States, there are a wide variety of marriage
functions found around the world. We tend towards romantic love in many cases in the U.S., where you
find someone whom you love and you marry them, or not, depending on what you prefer. Other places in
the world put a strong emphasis on marriage for: a) reproduction of the next generation; b) the creation of
alliances for trade; c) to help during times of warfare; d) protection of long-standing relationships
between families or villages.
(HUGE ASIDE AND PERSONAL COMMENT: I think that one of the problems in the U.S. is
an enormous emphasis on weddings and not enough on marriage. Believe what you want, do what you
want for your wedding day if you have one, but please consider that this is a day special to you and your
partner, but it should not come to incredible expense. That we glorify famous Hollywood families, and
what they do with their dresses, bridesmaids, honeymoons, etc. makes little sense in any world. My best
advice, since you did not ask for it, is to have a meaningful ceremony in whatever setting you believe is
most appropriate for you, marry your best friend, know that things may be rough in the future, but love
will prevail, and save the money you wanted to blow on a fancy ceremony/reception/honeymoon on a
down payment on a house or to pay off debts. Those bridesmaids will not wear their dresses again most
likely in an unironic manner. This is totally my opinion.)
Continuing now with actual notes…
When we define couples, we try to determine if they are marrying within their own group
(endogamy) or outside of their group (exogamy). Endogamy is not inbreeding, but it means that if you
are Mexican and marry another Mexican, you are practicing endogamy. It would be the same for a
Kenyan marrying a Kenyan or a Vietnamese person marrying another person from Vietnam. However,
even within those categories, you might marry someone from a different background, such as someone
from Guadalajara who is Catholic marrying someone from Nayarit who is Jewish. That couple MIGHT be
exogamous if they consider themselves to be more different than similar; but if they married because
they’re both Mexican and that is how they identify, then they are endogamous.
There are many ways to define marriage within anthropology, from having one spouse
(monogamy), to having one spouse at a time (serial monogamy), to one man marrying several women
(polygyny) or marrying several women who are sisters (sororal polygyny), to one woman marrying
several men (polyandry) who usually are brothers (fraternal polyandry), to group marriage where a
whole bunch of men are married to a whole bunch of women. It is important to understand why these
different types of marriage occur, not just that they occur.
Monogamy usually relates to financial independence such as in the United States. We tend to be
able to support ourselves as individuals, so we can marry one person if we would like to.
Polygyny produces large numbers of offspring to work, such as in horticultural or agricultural
cultures. If a woman is widowed, her brother-in-law (her sister’s husband) might marry her either in name
or outright to protect her property and her children. You can learn more about the functions of polygyny
at this link: http://anthropology.iresearchnet.com/polygyny/
Polyandry tends to occur in places such as Tibet where there is little arable land, and the eldest
son receives the inheritance of the land. In that case, having many women in the family causes problems
because more children = less land per family. So, while the option now is to move away from agriculture
in the high steppes of Mongolia and Tibet, the traditional option was to have one woman marry a series of
brothers. Which husband had access to the woman depended on the individual family, but it certainly
reduced the ability to reproduce multiple offspring compared with five men with five wives. You can go
to this link to learn more about polyandry in Tibet: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/nebanthro/113/
There is a wonderful example from India of a traditional group known as the Nayar and we refer
to their form of marriage as the Nayar exception. Picture a social system where the Nayar men are
warriors and they are basically born to die (if they live, that’s great, but after all, a warrior knows what
he’s getting into here). Before he goes off to die, he might like to leave an heir, to take care of his parents
and siblings, so he gets married the Nayar way. He makes a contract with a woman and her female
relatives (mother, older sisters, grandmothers) that if they marry, he will spend the remaining time he has
left before deployment with his bride. If she becomes pregnant with a boy, the boy is sent back to the
husband’s family, and if she has a girl, the girl is raised by the mother. This is a temporary marriage for
financial reasons, and the woman decides whether she wants to marry any man. She does not have to, but
she does receive financial compensation for her pregnancy either way, whether he survives or not. For
further details of Nayar life and culture, please to go to this link:
https://hubpages.com/education/NAYAR-CULTURE
To put it bluntly, men are purchasing a uterus. Crass, but there it is. A man claims, legally and
financially, his children and in a sense, when he marries, he not only has access to that uterus but also
gives protection to those children and the possessor of the uterus. He is also removing an important
worker from the bride’s family, and so to compensate his in-laws for their trouble, many traditional
cultures require the groom to pay what is known as bride wealth or to provide bride service.
Bride wealth, often negotiated by the bride’s family, is how much a woman is worth to her family
in livestock, land, goods, etc. To have access to his bride, a groom must pay this bride wealth to the
bride’s family. However, it is possible that the groom cannot pay for a bride in which case he will enter a
contract to work for the father-in-law for as long as the contract requires before he can have access to the
bride and therefore produce children.
Many non-anthropologists confuse bride wealth/bride service with dowry, which is not the same
thing at all. Dowry in the U.S. used to come in the form of hope chests (and sometimes still does) where
the parents of the bride, especially her mother, set aside important items in a large wooden box for the
couple: linens, china, silver (things that show up in contemporary wedding registries and bridal showers).
The original dowry was meant as an insurance policy for the bride should the husband die or turn out to
be an ass but hopefully, if all went well, these items were passed to the daughters of the bride on their
wedding days as party of their dowry and as heirlooms.
In extreme cases, you may have read about dowry deaths in parts of India, where sometimes
arranged marriages still occur. Arranged marriages range from best friends who decide when their
children are born that their families will be united in marriage one day to complete strangers who end up
married through paid matchmakers (not just “Fiddler on the Roof”, they really do still exist). In cases
where families do not know one another, there have been some tragic instances where women move from
their homes into the homes of their husbands and bring significant dowry with them. Sometimes this
includes cars or boats; in some terrible cases, the women have been killed for their dowry, and a few men
have been found guilty of serial dowry murders for profit. To learn more about dowry deaths from the
legal perspective, you can go to this site: https://sclaw.in/category/dowry-death/
Please keep in mind this is a tiny fraction of the arranges marriages in India. The fact that it has
happened at all is horrible. Could it happen in the U.S.? Of course! If you check out “Dateline NBC” or
any of those other news programs; greed is international. Are all arranged marriages horrible? Of course
not. I know many couples who are perfectly happy with their arranged marriage, including my best friend
since 7th grade’s parents. Her dad was brought to a matchmaking party to be set up with one sister and
ended up falling in love with another sister, but it all ended well. They were married over 50 years before
he passed, and my best friend’s mom’s sister has been married happily the same amount of time ☺
Now comes the fun question: where do you live after you get married? It depends.
If you come from a matrilineal (family is traced through the mother’s side of the family) society
where inheritance comes down through the mother’s side, you’re most likely going to be matrilocal or
live in the wife’s village like the Haudenosaunee Nation of NY/Canada or the Cherokee Nation or the
Nayar. If your society is patrilineal or traces family through the father’s side, you are most likely going to
live with the groom’s village or be patrilocal like the Lakota of the Plains or traditional Chinese families.
It gets a little more complicated with ambilocal (moving between both families) and bilocal
cultures (living with either family, but you choose when you get married). Traditionally in communities
in Greece due to agriculture, the bride and groom move between the parents depending on whose crop
requires harvesting. You might come from families who grow olives or grapes or raise sheep, so whoever
needs you the most receives your company until the harvest/tending is complete. Bilocal families include
places like Samoa in the South Pacific where the bride and groom decide on their post-marriage location
by the resources available to them at that time. After all, with island nations, it is much more challenging
to find a good balance of food and clean potable water.
My favorite, because it is so darn complicated and unusual is called avunculocal and my goal is
to find a way to play this word in Scrabble somehow. The newlyweds live in the same village with the
groom’s mother’s eldest brother, thus the uncle in the name. The reason that they live under the protection
of the uncle and not the groom’s father is that it is the uncle who raised the boy and acted as a father to
him while his biological father acted more like his sibling. BUT the father-in-law to the new bride is
someone else’s uncle, so it all works out in the end. If the mother-in-law did not have any brothers, a
suitable elder male relative would have acted in that role as she was growing up and will invite the
newlyweds to live in his village. A great example of a society who is avunculocal whom you already
know are the Trobriand Islanders.
While the trend of neolocal, newlyweds living on their own, has been popular starting in the 20th
Century in the U.S. with more financial stability, with the financial issues beginning in the early 21st
Century, the move towards moving in with extended family has returned. It is a financial benefit for the
younger generations and a form of social support for both the youngest and eldest generation involved. In
the Boston area where I grew up, there were triple decker houses where three generations of the same
family lived in their own but connected living spaces. Usually, the newlyweds lived in the basement, the
grandparents lived on the ground floor and the parents lived in the top floor, each generation moving
subsequently as they passed on. We have family friends who still have this arrangement today, except that
while the mother lives on the first floor, her son, and his family live in the basement apartment and his
sister and her family live on the top floor. It’s all wonderfully cozy, though, and they love the
arrangement, especially the grandchildren who get to spend time with cousins and grandmother every
day.

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