Breakfast Pastries

Breakfast pastries in The Anthropologists function as symbols of domestic intimacy and cultural performance within the characters' expatriate existence. The most significant appearance of pastries occurs when Asya picks up pastries to celebrate Manu's parents' visit, setting the table with candles and cloth napkins in an elaborate gesture of hospitality. However, Manu's parents reject these decorative elements, putting the napkins to the side and calling the decadence wasteful, which creates a moment of cultural collision between their adopted lifestyle and their families' more austere values. The pastries thus represent Asya and Manu's attempts to create ceremonial significance and beauty in their daily lives—part of their broader project of constructing meaning and belonging in their adopted city. Yet the parents' rejection reveals how these gestures of domesticity can be read as performative rather than authentic, highlighting the tension between the couple's cosmopolitan aspirations and their...