Research Catalog

Title

Food and culture : a reader / edited by Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik.

Publication

New York : Routledge, 1997.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Additional Authors

• Counihan, Carole, 1948-
• Van Esterik, Penny.

Description

424 p. : ill.; 27 cm.

Summary

Publisher description "http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0651/96046430-d.html" Food touches everything important to people: it marks social differences and strengthens social bonds. Common to all peoples, yet it can signify very different things from table to table. Food and Culture takes a global look at the social, symbolic and political-economic role of food. The stellar contributors to this reader examine some of the meanings of food and eating across cultures, with particular attention to how men and women define themselves differently through their foodways. Articles reveal how food habits and beliefs both present a microcosm of any culture and also contribute to our understanding of human behavior. Crossing many disciplinary boundaries, this reader includes the perspectives of anthropology, history, psychology, philosophy, and sociology. The reader starts out by illustrating food's ability to convey symbolic meaning and communicates about a wide range of subjects. Next, the articles draw attention to how the practices of giving, receiving and refusing food initiate, solidify or rupture social bonds. Essays exploring the relation between body image, eating and sexuality in different societies give particular attention to the special and contradictory relation between women and food. Also demonstrated is the relation between the commodification of food, food industries, political power and colonial dominance. Contributors include: Roland Barthes, Susan Bordo, Carolyn Walker Bynum, M.F.K. Fisher, Anna Freud, Jack Goody, Claude Levi-Strauss, Margaret Mead, and Elisa J. Sobo.

Subject

• Food > Social aspects
• Food habits

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

• Foreword from The gastronomical me / M.F.K Fisher -- Introduction / Carole Counuhan and Penny Van Esterik -- Food, meaning, and voice. The changing significance of food / Margaret Mead -- Toward a psychosociology of contemporary food consumption / Roland Barthes -- The culinary triangle / Claude Lévi-Strauss -- Deciphering a meal / Mary Douglas -- The semiotics of food in the Bible / Jean Soler -- The abominable pig / Marvin Harris -- Traditional medical values of food / E.N. Anderson -- Commensality and fasting : giving, receiving, and refusing food. Food as a cultural construction / Anna Meigs -- The psychoanalytic study of infantile feeding disturbances / Anna Freud -- Nutritional processes and personality development among the Gurage of Ethiopia / Dorothy N. Shack -- Hunger, anxiety, and ritual : deprivation and spirit possession among the Gurage of Ethiopia / William A. Shack -- Fast, feast, and flesh : the religious significance of food to medieval women / Caroline Walker Bynum -- The appetite as voice / Joan Jacobs Brumberg -- Conflict and deference / Marjorie Devault -- Food, body, and culture. An anthropological approach to the problem of obesity / Hortense Powdermaker -- Body image and self-awareness / Hilde Bruch --
• (cont.) Anorexia nervosa : psychopathology as the crystallization of culture / Susan Bordo -- Que Gordita / Emily Massara -- The sweetness of fat : health, procreation, and sociability in rural Jamaica / Elisa J. Sobo -- Soul, black women, and food / Marvalene H. Hughes -- The political economy of food : commodification and scarcity. Bread as world : food habits and social relations in modernizing Sardinia / Carole Counihan -- Japanese mothers and Obentōs : the lunch box as ideological state apparatus / Anne Allison -- On the civilizing of appetite / Stephen Mennell -- Industrial food : towards the development of a world cuisine / Jack Goody -- Time, sugar and sweetness / Sidney W. Mintz -- The politics of breastfeeding : an advocacy perspective / Penny Van Esterik -- Hunger, malnutrition and poverty in the contemporary United States : some observations on their social cultural context / Janet M. Fitchen -- Beyond the myths of hunger : what can we do? / Frances Moore Lappé and Joseph Collins.

ISBN

• 0415917093
• 0415917107 (pbk. : alk. paper)

LCCN

^^^96046430^

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library