Global Consumptions: Food, Eating, and Power in Comparative Perspective

Using interdisciplinary approaches, we will examine the practices and politics of food and eating in a range of regions. Food sustains not only bodies, but national, ethnic, and social identities as well. Notions of time and space, order and transgression, nature and culture have long affected what people eat and how they do it. How does eating, this most basic and universal of human practices, both reflect difference and create it? How are food systems, symbolic and “real,” linked to national and international politics: Finally, how are contemporary food practices influenced by “modernization” and “globalization”? We will consider these and other questions as they apply to Asia, Europe, Africa, Latin America, and the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. 3 hrs. sem. (Anthropology)/