A Study on Popular Naga Cuisine and Its Representation on Instagram
Food is a very sensitive topic as it is the representation of culture that shapes identity such that any flaw in representation could result in identity confusion or identity clashes. Food culture and its meaning varies from one culture to another. Also, very often one will notice that a cuisine which is a delicacy for a community could be a taboo or unacceptable for the other. India is known for its rich diverse culture, which includes geography, lifestyle, food habits, biodiversity and more. It is commonly seen that dominant food are often presented as the national cuisine while relegating others to the margins or erasing them altogether. A society is dynamic in nature, which goes through constant social issues too. But while the society strives to solve or seek for a solution to the conventionally defined social problem it fails to count in the misrepresentation of food culture as an issue that results in identity crisis. The dependency on media has increased tremendously such that a personal opinion and views about a subject are shaped by the sources that are readily available at their convenience in the form of social media. Today the concept of food gram that is the combination of Food and Instagram is a very popular trend among netizen. Instagram is an online photo-video sharing application where popularly in these context users post food images of what they eat, with whom and where. Whereas for professional based account it is seen as a marketing forum. The representation of food culture on social media is seen as an advantage and a challenge. The food culture of the Naga Tribes of Nagaland, Northeast, is the core of the study. It aims to understand the dominant tribal representation of Naga food and seek to understand how these representations on Instagram shape perceptions about the Naga population. The researcher has adopted a theoretical framework of Representation and Semiotics. A triangulation method approach has been applied for the study in analyzing Instagram post that is hash tagged, #nagacuisine from the month of July and August 2018. How Instagram as a medium represent Naga food and how it shapes an identity for the Naga population is what this study will seek to understand.