Always Hungry, Never Greedy

Always Hungry, Never Greedy PDF Author: Miriam Kahn
Publisher: Waveland Press
ISBN: 1478609184
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
The Wamira people of Papua New Guinea display what outsiders would describe as an obsession with food. Who owns how many pigs, how much taro grows in whose garden, and who contributes what food at a feast, are all questions uppermost in their thoughts. Wamirans account for this preoccupation by saying that they suffer from perpetual famine. They explain this by means of an elaborate and colorful myth about Tamodukorokoro, a monster who would have brought them abundant food, but whom, in typical Wamiran style of fearing what they desire, they chased away. In this carefully crafted and beautifully evocative book, Kahn, who lived with the Wamira people for two and a half years, argues that Wamirans famine has in fact little to do with the belly. For Wamirans, concepts of food and hunger are cultural constructs. By means of food, they objectify emotions, balance relations between men and women, communicate rivalries among men, and ultimately, control the ambivalent desires that they fear would otherwise control them. Effectively combining analyses of myths and symbols with analytical accounts of subsistence and ritual behavior, Kahn writes with a degree of nuance that takes the reader beyond academic analyses into the experience of the ethnographer and the daily lives of the people with whom she resided.

Always Hungry, Never Greedy

Always Hungry, Never Greedy PDF Author: Miriam Kahn
Publisher: Waveland Press
ISBN: 1478609184
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Wamira people of Papua New Guinea display what outsiders would describe as an obsession with food. Who owns how many pigs, how much taro grows in whose garden, and who contributes what food at a feast, are all questions uppermost in their thoughts. Wamirans account for this preoccupation by saying that they suffer from perpetual famine. They explain this by means of an elaborate and colorful myth about Tamodukorokoro, a monster who would have brought them abundant food, but whom, in typical Wamiran style of fearing what they desire, they chased away. In this carefully crafted and beautifully evocative book, Kahn, who lived with the Wamira people for two and a half years, argues that Wamirans famine has in fact little to do with the belly. For Wamirans, concepts of food and hunger are cultural constructs. By means of food, they objectify emotions, balance relations between men and women, communicate rivalries among men, and ultimately, control the ambivalent desires that they fear would otherwise control them. Effectively combining analyses of myths and symbols with analytical accounts of subsistence and ritual behavior, Kahn writes with a degree of nuance that takes the reader beyond academic analyses into the experience of the ethnographer and the daily lives of the people with whom she resided.

Always Hungry, Never Greedy

Always Hungry, Never Greedy PDF Author: Miriam Kahn
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780881337761
Category : Food habits
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"The Wamira people of Papua New Guinea display what outsiders would describe as an obsession with food. Who owns how many pigs, how much taro grows in whose garden, and who contributes what food at a feast, are all questions uppermost in their thoughts. Wamirans account for this preoccupation by saying that they suffer from perpetual "famine." They explain this by means of an elaborate and colorful myth about Tamodukorokoro, a monster who would have brought them abundant food, but whom, in typical Wamiran style of fearing what they desire, they chased away.

Death Without Weeping

Death Without Weeping PDF Author: Nancy Scheper-Hughes
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520911563
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 632

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Book Description
When lives are dominated by hunger, what becomes of love? When assaulted by daily acts of violence and untimely death, what happens to trust? Set in the lands of Northeast Brazil, this is an account of the everyday experience of scarcity, sickness and death that centres on the lives of the women and children of a hillside "favela". Bringing her readers to the impoverished slopes above the modern plantation town of Bom Jesus de Mata, where she has worked on and off for 25 years, Nancy Scheper-Hughes follows three generations of shantytown women as they struggle to survive through hard work, cunning and triage. It is a story of class relations told at the most basic level of bodies, emotions, desires and needs. Most disturbing - and controversial - is her finding that mother love, as conventionally understood, is something of a bourgeois myth, a luxury for those who can reasonably expect, as these women cannot, that their infants will live.

The Archaeology and Politics of Food and Feasting in Early States and Empires

The Archaeology and Politics of Food and Feasting in Early States and Empires PDF Author: Tamara L. Bray
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 0306482460
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
This volume examines the commensal politics of early states and empires and offers a comparative perspective on how food and feasting have figured in the political calculus of archaic states in both the Old and New Worlds. It provides a cross-cultural and comparative analysis for scholars and graduate students concerned with the archaeology of complex societies, the anthropology of food and feasting, ancient statecraft, archaeological approaches to micro-political processes, and the social interpretation of prehistoric pottery.

Inside Cultures

Inside Cultures PDF Author: William Balée
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100041129X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
This concise, contemporary option for instructors of cultural anthropology breaks away from the traditional structure of introductory textbooks. Emphasizing the interaction between humans and their environment, the tension between human universals and cultural variation, and the impacts of colonialism on traditional cultures, Inside Cultures shows students how cultural anthropology can help us understand the complex, globalized world around us. This third edition: contains brand new material on many subjects, including anthropological approaches to anti-racism social movements in the Global North during 2020; includes findings in anthropological research regarding the Covid-19 pandemic, and its relation to other recent global events and conditions; updates the organization and presentation of cultural universals and cultural variations; presents updated and enhanced discussions of anthropological studies of humankind and the environment, with expanded analysis of industrial agriculture in the age of globalization; includes more illustrations and updates to existing illustrations, sidebars, and guideposts throughout the volume; is written in clear, supple prose that delights readers while informing on content of one of the important courses in a liberal arts education, one that effectively bridges humanities and the sciences.

Training the Body for China

Training the Body for China PDF Author: Susan Brownell
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226076461
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 410

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Book Description
Competing in the 1986 National College Games of the People's Republic of China, Susan Brownell earned both a gold medal in the heptathlon and fame throughout China as "the American girl who won glory for Beijing University." Now an anthropologist, Brownell draws on her direct experience of Chinese athletics in this fascinating look at the culture of sports and the body in China. Training the Body for China is the first book on Chinese sports based on extended fieldwork by a Westerner. Brownell introduces the notion of "body culture" to analyze Olympic sports as one element in a whole set of Chinese body practices: the "old people's disco dancing" craze, the new popularity of bodybuilding (following reluctant official acceptance of the bikini), mass calisthenics, martial arts, military discipline, and more. Translating official and dissident materials into English for the first time and drawing on performance theory and histories of the body, Brownell uses the culture of the body as a focal point to explore the tensions between local and global organizations, the traditional and the modern, men and women. Her intimate knowledge of Chinese social and cultural life and her wide range of historic examples make Training the Body for China a unique illustration of how gender, the body, and the nation are interlinked in Chinese culture.

Food and Nutrition

Food and Nutrition PDF Author: Paul Fieldhouse
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1489932569
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
As someone who was trained in the clinical sdentific tradition it took me several years to start to appreciate that food was more than a collection of nutrients, and that most people did not make their choices of what to eat on the biologically rational basis of nutritional composition. This realiza tion helped tobring me to an understanding of why people didn't always eat what (I believed) was good for them, and why the patients I had seen in hospital as often as not had failed to follow the dietary advice I had so confidently given. When I entered the field of health education I quickly discovered the farnaus World Health Organization definition of health as being a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease. Health was a triangle -and I had been guilty of virtu ally ignoring two sides of that triangle. As I became involved in practical nutrition education initiatives the deficiencies of an approach based on giving information about nutrition and physical health became more and more apparent. The children whom I saw in schools knew exactly what to say when asked to describe a nutritious diet: they could recite the food guide and list rich sources of vitamins and minerals; but none of this intellectual knowledge was reflected in their own actual eating habits.

Food and Gender

Food and Gender PDF Author: Carole M. Counihan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134416385
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 179

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Book Description
This volume examines, among other things, the significance of food-centered activities to gender relations and the construction of gendered identities across cultures. It considers how each gender's relationship to food may facilitate mutual respect or produce gender hierarchy. This relationship is considered through two central questions: How does control of food production, distribution, and consumption contribute to men's and women's power and social position? and How does food symbolically connote maleness and femaleness and establish the social value of men and women? Other issues discussed include men's and women's attitudes towards their bodies and the legitimacy of their appetites.

Struggling With Development

Struggling With Development PDF Author: Lynn Kwiatkowski
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429965621
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
Struggling with Development is a study of the complex relationships among international development, hunger, and gender in the context of political violence in the Philippines. This ethnography demonstrates that gender-specific international development, which has among its main goals the alleviation of hunger in women and children and the raising

Activity, Diet and Social Practice

Activity, Diet and Social Practice PDF Author: Sarah Schrader
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030025446
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
Day-to-day activities are important in the development of social identities, the establishment of social standing, and the communal understanding of societal rules. This perspective is broadly referred to as practice theory and relates to the power of an overarching social structure and the individual actors that exist within it. Practice theory has made an important contribution to anthropological and archaeological research as these fields are particularly interested in daily life and the importance of these actions. This volume argues that practice theory can also be used in a bioarchaeological context through the examination of human skeletal remains and the archaeological context in which they were excavated. Bioarchaeology offers a unique perspective on these day-to-day experiences—skeletal tissue is constantly undergoing a process of change and, as a living biological system, it can adapt to external forces. Furthermore, bioarchaeological studies are multi-scalar and can examine individuals, groups, or entire populations. Using osteological indicators of activity patterns (entheseal changes, osteoarthritis) and dietary isotopes (carbon, nitrogen) as examples, this book addresses patterns of everyday life in the ancient past. Physical activities and food consumption are actions that are carried out on a daily basis. While bioarchaeology does not have the ability to recreate specific day-to-day activities, we can assess broad trends in everyday life. The volume illustrates these points using examples from the Ancient Nile Valley. Through the examination of over 800 Egyptian and Nubian individuals from five different archaeological sites, the research addresses patterns of everyday life as they relate to social inequality, agency, and practice. Beyond osteological indicators of activity and dietary patterns, this book also discusses additional methods that can be pursed to draw attention to daily life. Lastly, this book also highlights the applicability of and potential contribution that practice theory can make to this area of research.