Food: Ethnographic Encounters

by Leo Coleman

Overview

Food preparation, consumption, and exchange are eminently social practices, and experiencing another cuisine often provides our first encounter with a different culture. This volume presents fascinating essays about cooking, eating, and sharing food, by anthropologists working in many parts of the world, exploring what they learned by eating with others.

These are accounts of specific experiences - of cooking in Mombasa, shopping for organic produce in Vienna, eating vegetarian in Vietnam, raising and selling chickens in Hong Kong, and of refugees subsisting on food aid. With a special focus on the experience and challenge of ethnographic fieldwork, the essays cover a wide range of topics in food studies and anthropology, including food safety and food security, cultural diversity and globalization, colonial histories and contemporary identities, and changing ecological, social, and political relations across cultures.

Food: Ethnographic Encounters offers readers a broad view of the vibrancy of local and global food cultures, and provides an accessible introduction to both food studies and contemporary ethnography.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781847889072
Publisher:	Berg Publishers
Publication date:	01/17/2012
Series:	Encounters: Experience and Anthropological Knowledge , #3
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	702,017
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Leo Coleman is Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Studies at The Ohio State University.

Table of Contents

Notes on Contributors vii

Foreword xi

Acknowledgements xiv

Introduction Leo Coleman 1

1 Food and Morality in Yemen Anne Meneley 17

2 It All Started with the Bhajias Nina Berman 31

3 The Enchantments of Food in the Lower Amazon, Brazil Mark Harris 39

4 Live Poultry Markets and Avian Flu in Hong Kong Frédéric Keck 49

5 Revisiting Lao Food: Pain and Commensality Penny Van Esterik 59

6 In Search of the Elusive Heirloom Tomato: Farms and Farmers' Markets, Fields and Fieldwork Jennifer A. Jordan 69

7 Keeping out of the Kitchen: Cooking and Power in a Moroccan Household Claire Nicholas 83

8 "Do You Know How to Eat...?" Edible Expertise in Ho Chi Minh City Nina Hien 97

9 Learning to Exchange Words for Food in the Marquesas Kathleen C. Riley 111

10 Eating Vegetarian in Vietnam Christophe Robert 127

11 The Food of Sorrow: Humanitarian Aid to Displaced People Elizabeth Cullen Dunn 139

12 Guide to Further Reading Leo Coleman 151

Select Bibliography 161

Index 167

Editorial Reviews

This is an excellent sampler of recent ethnographic work on food. Most of the chapters take you deep into the significance of food and eating in an unfamiliar cultural setting. The book is accessible to anyone interested in food, though it is going to be most useful to serious students. This could be an excellent text for a course in the anthropology of food.” —Richard R. Wilk, Amazon US

From the Publisher