Why Food Matters: The Anthropology of Food and Foodways

 

Setting the Anthropological Table

Japanese food manga featuring the "superhero" and chef Sōma.
Shokugeki no Soma is about a boy named Sōma Yukihira who dreams of becoming a chef.

The anthropological approach to the study of food and foodways will present a set of methodological and theoretical tools to enable us to select , assess, "chew on", and mentally "digest" the significance of meals and dishes from a variety of cuisines.

• Our book will provide a guide to the world's rich diversity of eating culture and to help explore the similarities, understand the differnces, and draw some general conclusions about our relationship with food.
• Social anthropology is the study of the everyday lives of ordinary people in all cultures, and within these cultures, one constant is food.
• The quest for food has been an essential part of the evolution of human beings, 
• The quest for food accounts for the formation of cooperative hunting groups 
• The quest for food serves as a source of our sociability through cooking and sharing food
• When something is designated as food underscores the cultural construction of what it is to be edible
• food becomes an "artifact". It is "cultured nature"
• Made by human ingenuity through a unique combination of ingredients using cultural techniques for acquisition and preparation.
• Food also has an aesthetic quality that is determined by culture and appraciated by that same culture
• Make make an edible assembled of what we believe to be "food"
• WHAT WE EAT IS SOCIALLY AND CULTURALLY PATTERNED AND CARRIES IMPORTANT MEANING
• Example: Japan and Rice
• There are always "staple foods" that define a cuisine. In Japan, you have not had a meal unless you have eaten rice. Without rice, there was only food, but not a meal.
  
• There are more than 120,000 varieties of rice in the world. In Japan, they are categorized by degree of milling, kernel size, starch content, and flavor.
• The importance of rice to culture. HERE
• The yearly quest to find Japan's best rice HERE
• Japan's culinary nationalism and "food manga" HERE (Japanese graphic novels)
• The activities surrounding food acquisition, preparation, and consumption lend themselves to cross-cultural comparison, allowing us to experience other's lives through the shared everyday experience of eating.

• Ethnography, Methodology, and Food
• Early ethnography utilized the "ethnographic present". This positioned cultures as static and bounded, despite their more complex reality.
• Today, ethnographies are more "problem focused" addressing specific aspects of people's practices. 
• they are located at a specific time and place and reveal the changing dynamics of culture and society. 
• they acknowledge that people, ideas, and things have always migrated (diffusion)and influenced each other and eroded the idea that there are isolated cultures with fast boundaries.
• they explore the internal and external influences on a particular place in a particular culture through time.
• culture becomes messy and dynamic -- fraught with contestation, disagreements, reconciliations, and strategies.
• They shed light on the daily experiences of individuals through the collection of "personal narratives" via "participant observation"
• Participant Observation
• tries to gain an EMIC perspective-- that of the cultural insider (a member of the culture/place) while applying the ETIC perspective of the outsider anthropologist to draw wider conclusions about how culture and society works.
• This involves everyday tasks that the fieldworker ideally can participate in. This hands on experience is essential in learning culinary traditions.
• helping with food acquisition
• preparing ingredients
• cooking
• cleaning
• Interviews (formal and informal) 
• life-histories around food
• the importance of kinship and social roles to understand "gastro-politics" at the level of the household or larger society. 
• memories of cooking and eating
• public discourse on food
• the many ways that people and communities talk about food.
• cultural classification
• religious and scientific menaings
• values assigned to food
• consumption rules
• identity work 
• taste preferences
• comparisons can be made about different members of society in relation to food (gender, age, social class), between different cultural or ethnic groups, different places, and different times. This allows us to find THEMES.

• Cultural Relativism and Food
• you can really see the importance of the meaning of food when we notice our biases when evaluating it. Icelandic Harðfiskur and Hákarl. HERE

• food debates in American culture:
• vegetarian
• vegan
• gluten free
• keto
• kosher/halal
• organic
• non-GMO
• All foods and food traditions must be approached objectively from an anthropological perspective

• Multi-sited Fieldwork
• A reality of modern methodology is that fieldwork is rarely limited to a single site. Instead, globalization and the the food commodity chains that "examine the circulation of cultural meanings, objects, and identities in a diffuse time-space." 
• Meaning: the travel of things across space and time allows for an opportunity to track their production and consumption to illuminate their cultural biographies.
• Food biographies follow commodity chains, revealing how the lives of everyone along the route are linked. 

• Globalization and Food Ethnography
• Globalization is the flow of people, ideas, and things at multiple points across the globe.
• at each point in the commodity chain, people...creating local culinary outcomes. food in these different points along the chain may have very different values and meanings.
• Food is consumed locally, no matter where the food is from, and it is in the places of consumption that values and meanings are given to food as part of settled people's everyday life.
• Anthropologists are interested in how, in our everyday lives, we are connected to distant people in the commodity chain.
• Foodscapes:
• the global flow of food and cuisines as they are produced, distributed, and exchanged, and as imagined and experienced in everyone's daily lives.
• food is commodified globally.
• but locally, people can de-commodify food and invest it with local significance
• globalization can bring about a defense of the local, the revival and creation of new food traditions, and the blending of old and new ideas, things, and practices.

• Cuisines (culinary identity)
• long-term, largely nutritious food adaptations that have supported generation through time (not random), 
• carry great value and meaning, 
• wrought by the environment and history, 
• full of emotionally connective power. 
• everyday, routine, often unselfconscious cultural acts 
• relevance waxes and wanes with intensity depending on the circumstances
• have powerful emotive forces - a culinary expression of a place and a people
• the culmination of the influences -
• the environment, 
• the food-getting strategies, 
• the organization of production through kinship, age, gender, and specialization,
•  the social and political organization, 
• ideology, and 
• the circumstances of history and encounters with other cultures.
• example: The Middle East
• the war over hummus HERE
• culinary roots and cultural resistance HERE
• great world food controversies HERE

• Eating as an Embodied Experience
• our experiences in the world are mediated by our bodies - through our senses we engage with one another and all other aspects of our physical environment. 
• food engages with our physicality in many sensorial ways:
• gathering/harvesting
• shopping
• cooking
• eating is the most profound form of consumption we engage in, which affords it particularly potent maening in culture.

Learning to Look and Listen

 Learning How To Look: "Deep Observation" and "Thick Description":

THE ETICS

• Beginner's Mind (assume you know nothing and look at everything with fresh eyes)
• Take your time (hang out at your site at different times so your images are representative of the site)
• Look for the unusual in the usual
• Describe everything in as much detail as possible, you never know what will be important later.
• look everywhere: up, down, sideways.

Click here for a great article on looking by a photographer and writer.

What to Jot about:

                                                                 Notes

• observations
• impressions
• personal feelings
• tentative explanations
• behaviors
• body language
• sketches of places
• words (vocabulary)
• scents, sounds

Students need to make a distinction between what they OBSERVE and how they INTERPRET what they observe (keep them separate---the whats and the whys)

                                                                       Updated Notes

How to do it:

• be flexible, what you planned on taking notes on may be less interesting than what is in front of you
• be sensitive to people 
• include informants in jottings/interact
• frame what you are doing in a positive and non intrusive way 
• be selective about when to take notes
• Ethics
• ensure confidentiality (pseudonym or coding) and omit sensitive information
• be upfront about what you are doing

What to write

• terse, evocative phrases
• short quotes or phrases hat seem important (note time on recording)
• maps and sketches
• gestures, flavors, shouts, whispers, and all first impressions
• distinguish between WHAT you saw and tasted and heard (objective) and HOW you interpreted these things (subjective).
• do not impute MOTIVE (describe what you see and hear instead)
• do not make guesses or judgments
• describe observed behavior in as much detail as possible (don't use vague descriptions of mental states or attitudes).

                                                          More Notes

Writing Up Your Fieldnotes

• write up your notes ASAP so you do not forget things
• headnotes (fill in the jottings)
• keep a separate journal of your emotional responses (optional)

Doing Ethnographic Interviews:

THE EMIC...

• Session 1: get comfortable with each other and establish rapport
• get comfortable
• no right answers
• answer questions and explain project
• demonstrate a non-judgmental attitude and establish trust
• Sessions which follow: subsequent sessions give informant a chance to reflect
• do not read off a list of questions
• avoid directed questions, let informant speak until they are finished
• remember it is your interviewee's story (not the projects)
• ethics:
•  ensure anonymity that is important to informant
• be prepared to leave out information which is damaging
• Neutral Topic
• start interviews with neutral (easy) topics
• avoid ASSUMPTIONS and EXPECTATIONS
• Cultural differences and miscommunication
• Do not take the meaning of words, phrases or gestures for granted-even if you know them!
• Process
• develop rapport
• apprehension (emphasize the importance of THEIR story)
• explanation (restate what the informant says for confirmation)
• cooperation (equal partners)
• participation (interviewee as teacher)
• Breaks in Interview
• avoid leading questions

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Steps to Creating a Research Design

• usually begin with abroad research question, but this question must be clearly articulated and carefully linked to the methodology of the research itself.
• Research question usually emerges from observations gathered from informal visits to the fieldsite
• linked to the process of exploration/modified in the field
• good question centers around interests of the larger research community if possible
• research NARROWLY and think BROADLY
• read and think deeply about prior work
• think historically
• do a thorough literature review
• something you are DEEPLY CURIOUS ABOUT
• requires lengthly period of engagement, based on participant observation,  entailing a significant commitment of time, emotion and energy.

Selecting a Group or Activity or Topic to Study

• must always explain what you mean by "community"
• group size depends on the community or activity you are studying
• ethnography or ethnology?
• traditional or autoethnography?

Scope of the Fieldsite

• single site (traditional)
• focused
• multi-sited ethnography (more illustrative of the post globalization world). 
• sites trace linkages: people, artifact, behaviors across national boundaries.
• online and offline
• follow the behavior rather than be constrained by a physical boundary

Ethnography is Embedded and Embodied

• Understanding how to behave within social groupings is the first and most important task of the ethnographer entering a fieldsite. 
• specialized knowledge: language, religion, food traditions, politeness rules, gender distinctions, etc. are all part of necessary knowledge. 
• in-person interaction is more productive (easier to get information).
• participant observation is the bedrock of ethnography

What is the Focus of Anthropological Fieldwork?

 Anthropological Fieldwork is about 

• Learning How to Research
• Learning How to Observe and Participate
• Learning How to Make and Record Meaning
• Learning How to Write

Two stances are necessary simultaneously

• insider
• outsider

You are always to some extent both an insider and outsider based on your many personal identity markers and your experience. In sum, in any particular fieldwork site we are principally one or the other. REFLECTION is all important here as uncovering and being aware of our assumptions and recognizing our stereotypes helps to develop an appreciation of cultures unlike our own.

CULTURE The medium for human experience

An invisible web of behaviors, patterns, rules, rituals, ideas, values, products and practices shared among a group of people. (one definition).

• Culture is difficult to define, and each definition is incomplete
• Culture is local and man-made and hugely variable. It tends to be integrated. A culture, like an individual is more or a less consistent pattern of though and action. (Benedict).
• A Society's culture is  whatever one needs to know or believe in order to operate in a manner that is acceptable to its members...it does not consist of things, people, behavior or emotions. It is rather, an organization of those things (Goodenough)
• [C]ulture, that is,... the socially inherited assemblage of practices and beliefs that determines the texture of our lives. (Sapir) 
• An organization of conventional understandings manifest in act and artifact, which, persisting through tradition, characterizes a human group. (Redfield, quoted in Ogburn & Nimkoff) 
• Culture is essentially a construct that describes the total body of belief, behavior, knowledge, sanctions, values, and goals that mark the way of life of any people. That is, though a culture may be treated by the student as capable of objective description, in the final analysis it comprises the things that people have, the things they do, and what they think. (Herskovits)
• [Culture is] the various standards for perceiving, evaluating, believing, and doing that... [a person] attributes to other persons as a result of his experience of their actions and admonitions.... Insofar as a person finds he must attribute different standards to different sets of others, he perceives these sets as having different cultures. (Ward Goodenough) 
• A society’s culture consists of whatever it is one has to know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members.... Culture Is not a material phenomenon; it does not consist of things, people, behavior, or emotions. It is rather an organization of these things. It is the forms of things that people have in mind, their models for perceiving, relating, and otherwise interpreting them. (Goodenough)
•  ... the sum of a given society’s folk classifications, all of that society’s ethnoscience, its particular ways of classifying its material and social universe. Thus, to take an extreme example, the ‘ethnopornography’ of the Queensland aborigines is what they consider pornographic—if indeed they have such a category—rather than what was considered pornography by the Victorian ethnologist [who studied them]. (Sturtevant) 
• The culture concept... denotes an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life. (Geertz) 
• It is through culture patterns, ordered clusters of significant symbols, that man makes sense of the events through which he lives.The study of culture, the accumulated totality of such patterns, is thus the study of the machinery individuals and groups of individuals employ to orient themselves in a world otherwise opaque.... Peoples everywhere have developed symbolic structures in terms of 2 which persons are perceived not baldly as such, as mere unadorned member’s of the human race, but as representatives of certain distinct categories of persons, specific sorts of individuals.... The everyday world in which the members of any community move, their takenforgranted field of social action, is populated not by anybodies, faceless men without qualities, but by somebodies, concrete classes of determinate persons positively characterized and appropriately labelled. (Geertz) 
• Culture is best seen not as complexes of concrete behavior patterns—customs, usages, traditions, habit clusters— as has, by and large, been the case up to now, but as a set of control mechanisms— plans, recipes, rules, instructions...—for the governing of behavior. (Geertz) 
• Anthropological analysis reduces to the ability to ‘see things from the native’s point of view’.... To grasp concepts that, for another people, are experiencenear, and to do so well enough to place them in illuminating connection with experiencedistant concepts theorists have fashioned to capture the general features of social life, is clearly a task at least as delicate, if a bit less magical, as putting oneself into someone else’s skin. The trick is not to get yourself into some inner correspondence of spirit with your informants. Preferring, like the rest of us, to call their souls their own, they are not going to be altogether keen about such an effort anyhow. The trick is to figure out what the devil they think they are up to.... in the country of the blind, who are not as unobservant as they look, the oneeyed is not king, he is spectator. (Geertz)
• The culture of a people is an ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles, which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulders of those to whom they properly belong. (Geertz) 
• Some of my work in this area has been guided by an image of a society as an organization for the production of social occasions, or ‘scenes,’ as I have called them, and of a culture as a script for planning, staging, and performing scenes.... [Culture is] a set of principles for creating dramas, for writing scripts, and, of course, for recruiting players and audiences. Culture provides principles for framing experience as eventful in particular ways, but it does not provide one with a neat set of eventtypes to map onto the world. Culture is not simply a cognitive map that people acquire, in whole or in part, more or less accurately, and then learn to read. People are cast out into the imperfectly charted, continually shifting seas of everyday life. Mapping them out is a constant process resulting not in an individual cognitive map, but in a whole chart case of rough, improvised, continually revised sketch maps. Culture does not provide a cognitive map, but rather a set of principles for map-making and navigation. Different cultures are like different schools of navigation designed to cope with different terrains and seas. (Frake) 
• Culture is, by definition here, a system of symbols and meanings. Culture contrasts with norms in that norms are oriented to patterns for action, whereas culture constitutes a body of definitions, premises, statements, postulates, presumptions, propositions, and perceptions about the nature of 3 the universe and man’s place in it. Where norms tell the actor how to play a scene, culture tells the actor how the scene is set and what it all means. Where norms tell the actor how to behave in the presence of ghosts, gods, and human beings, culture tells the actors what ghosts, gods, and human beings are and what they are all about.... The world at large, nature, the facts of life, whatever they may be, are always part of man’s perception of them as that perception is formulated through his culture. The world at large is not, indeed it cannot be, independent of the way in which his culture formulates his vision of what he is seeing.... Reality is itself constructed by the beliefs, understandings, and comprehensions entailed in cultural meanings. (Schneider) 
• Culture... [is] defined not simply as experiences functioning within the context of historical structures and social formations, but as ‘lived antagonistic relations’ situated within a complex of sociopolitical institutions and social forms that limit as well as enable human action.... It is a complex realm of antagonistic experiences mediated by power and struggle and rooted in the structural opposition of labor and capital, as one instance, and, in another instance, as the transformative ability of human beings to shape their lives while only being partially constrained by the social, political, and economic determinants that place interventions on their practice.... To rethink the concept of culture is thus to attempt to articulate not only the experiences and practices that are distinctive to a specific group or class, but also to link those experiences to the power exercised by the dominant class and the structural field over which the latter exercises control. (Giroux) 
• Culture is constituted by the relations between different classes and groups bounded by structural forces and material conditions and informed by a range of experiences mediated, in part, by the power exercised by a dominant society.... [C]ulture is constituted as a dialectical instance of power and conflict, rooted in the struggle over both material conditions and the form and content of practical activity. (Giroux)

Characteristics of Culture

• We can see from these definitions above, that the way someone chooses to study and/or analyze culture might be greatly impacted by the definition to which one ascribes. What we do know about culture is the following:
• learned
• shared
• integrated
• symbolic
• Cultures always change, and at the same time strive for equilibrium. This is known as the dynamics of culture.
• Cultures may be understood from two main perspectives (or a combination of both):
• Ideological: a set of beliefs, cognitive principles which guide thought and behavior
• Adaptive: a system of adaptation in response to the "environment"
• Cultures have internal variation
• individuals who are members of a culture differ
• the degree of internal variation depends on the scale of the society. Larger societies tend to be more heterogeneous and show higher levels of internal variation
• individuals make up cultures, they vary around the "core principles" and "model personalities" (Benedict). 
• A culture is composed of subcultures: this includes any group which is distinguished socially from another (this in addition to individual variation). 
• These social distinctions will be accompanied by differences in values, beliefs, ideals and behaviors. 
• The job of an anthropologist is to describe these to elucidate the complexity of culture and its integrative powers. 
• Being a member of a subculture does not remove you from membership in the common culture, nor do subcultures threaten the existence of a culture.
• common interest group
• age cohort
• ethnic group
• occupational group
• gender
• class
• neighborhood
• school
• sexuality

Anthropology is NOT Journalism:

• insider's perspective
• looking for multiple sources rather than facts
• deep, lengthy data collection and analysis
• use "principle informants" to guide research and check information
• do no harm (ethically) as a guideline for research and writing
• spend extended periods of time in the field

 Fieldwork/Field Methods

• Anthropologists strive to produce DETAILED, SITUATED accounts of specific cultures in a manner that reflects the perspective of the people in that culture. 

• The concept of THICK DESCRIPTION describes the kind of writing that is rich in situated context (Geertz)

• Anthropologists have respect for those that we study and their authority

• Fieldwork is by definition an EMBODIED practice where the anthropologist places themselves physically within the cultural they are studying. What to make of virtual or even technologically mediated participant observation, and can this even be possible?

so....

• Fieldwork is the foundation of creating ethnography in anthropology (Malinowski)
• The field is the site for doing research, and fieldworking is the process of doing it
• although there are other methods, participant-observation is the principle method for collecting data when fieldworking
• P-O studies people within the context of their (sub) culture
• fieldworking requires an emic and etic perspective (DeSaussure)
• emic: from the perspective (voice/worldview) of a member of the culture
• etic: from the outsider (anthropologist/observer's) perspective
• Everyday experience is the hallmark of good ethnography
• fieldworking helps you to look at everyday experiences in new ways
• good ethnography illustrates the importance of the everyday (mundane).
• It finds the magnitude of everyday experience by identifying rules and meanings (symbols which underlie cultural understanding)
• Anthropologists study others so that we can understand more about ourselves (and the human condition)
• we are often unaware of our our culture and motivations
• we tend to ignore the familiar
• we fail to analyze our own lives, because they seem so obvious, natural and correct (ethnocentrism)
• studying others allows us to see our own motivations and beliefs and appreciate the culture and worldview of others (cultural relativity).
• Studying our own culture requires us to think like outsiders so that we do not miss the familiar. (strange things stand out)
• Ethnography is the attempt by an anthropologist to describe a cultural reality so that one reading it might understand what it feels like to live within it. As such, anthropology is a powerful tool for developing empathy and understanding of complex realities. Anthropology accomplishes this in the following ways:
  
  
1. Creative nonfiction
2. giving powerful examples that are evocative
3. using an informants own words and analysis (ethnographers are not in ethnography)
• ethnography is "quote heavy"
• good ethnography allows a culture to speak for themselves in their voice.
• good ethnography leave out the first person voice of the ethnographer
4. critically presenting a people, their values, beliefs, products and practices as logical systems with their own internal elegance and logic (cultural relativity).

• The Problem with "Stories"
• "Because you have seen something doesn't mean you can explain it. Differing interpretations will always abound, even when good minds come to bear. The kernel of indisputable information is a dot in space; interpretations grow out of the desire to make this point a line, to give it direction. The directions in which it can be sent, the uses to which it can be put by a culturally, professionally, and geographically diverse society are almost without limit. The possibilities make good scientists chary." 
  (Barry Lopez (2013). 

• "The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. That is why we put these stories in each other's memories. This is how people care for themselves.”
  (Barry Lopez (2013).

Syllabus Field Methods: Food and Culture

 Anthropological Field Methods

Spring 2024

M/W 11:20-12:35

AC Campus Room 211

Professor Laurie Greene

Welcome to Anthropological Field Methods! This term we will be dipping our toes into anthropological research, learning the nuts and bolts of field methods, participant observation, and ethnographic analysis and writing. Our research this term will focus on the understanding of "FOODWAYS" in culture rather than a particular fieldsite. This will allow each of you to explore the complex meaning of food acquisition, preparation, and consumption and the important cultural meaning around food traditions, in foreign cultures and in our own.

I will use a number of sources to focus our assignments on skill building with small projects, on anthropological/ethnographic writing and storytelling styles and genres, and on the intersection between theory and practice found in the practice of multi-sited ethnography. If there is any "focus" to our research, it will be developing a sensitivity to and an eye for observing and understanding the complex meaning we attribute to everyday products and practices in American Culture and how as anthropologists we can be more reflexive in our ethnographic work.

Cultural Anthropology is the study of human cultures and the people who comprise them. The job of the anthropologist is to allow members of a culture to tell their stories, so, in essence an anthropologist provides a context in which those voices and stories are spoken. An anthropologist is not a journalist, looking for investigative truths, or an historian looking for historical facts. Anthropologists aim to present evocative and "realistic" presentations of informant's lives.

The study of food and culture provides a "rich" opportunity to see how culture is an integrated whole and all aspects of culture may be understood as a microcosm of culture. From studying the acquisition, form, classification, and uses of food we can better understand not just subsistence (food getting/consuming strategies), but all other aspects of culture - division of labor, gender dynamics, political structures, local and global economic networks, enculturation and identity, and even religious beliefs. We will also be able to study culture change as we observe food biographies and look at the ways local traditions evolve and maintain their unique character in the face of global forces. Cuisines we will see carry powerful emotive forces at the heart of social life.

As we make our way through hands-on assignments and discussion, you will have an opportunity to explore autoethnography as well as the study of other's food traditions (the more traditional ethnographic gaze). This course is structured as a hybrid so that you might utilized the time on Fridays to carry out weekly ethnographic research assignments. We will be discussing and posting these assignments on an AI writing/evaluation system called PACKBACK (you will need to purchase entry into this outside of the bookstore ---if this is an issue for financial aid reasons, come see me!!!ASAP). This toll will assist you in building a mini-ethnography on foodways and a "foodways portfolio" by the end of the term.

Texts
Required:
(1) Crowther, Gillian (2018) Eating Culture: An Anthropological Guide to Food. Second Edition. Toronto: University or Toronto Press.

(2) Chicago Style Guide for Citation and Referencing 
Suggested:
(1) Van Maanen, John. (2011). Tales of the Field, 2nd Edition (Chicago) University of Chicago Press.

Tools

PACKBACK

Handing in work

You will be required to hand in your work via PACKBACK. You will also be able to see all of your graded work on PACKBACK as well. (I will NOT be using BlackBoard for this course). The percentage breakdown for your assignments is listed below after the topical coverage. 

Syllabus and Reading List: Topical Coverage

I. The Shifting and Elusive Concept of CULTURE (1/17)

Readings:

(1) Required: Blog Posts
(2) Required: Eating Culture, Prologue: Setting the Anthropological Table, Pages
(3) Optional: Tales of the Field, Pages 1-12 

• Culture and Subculture
• Insider versus Outsider
• Ethnography or Journalism
• Observation and Reflection

Exercises in Ethnography #1: Preparation for the Field (due by 8:00am 1/22 on packback)-5%

Assignment: Choose a food tradition as your ethnographic focus for the semester. Research "ethnographies" and other writing which are already written about your focus group (this might include cookbooks, etc.). Compile an annotated bibliography of these works. This is the first stage of any foray into the field. 

II. Methods: In Pursuit of Culture Through Food (1/22-1/24)
Readings:
(1) Required: Blog

(2) Required: Eating Culture, Chapter 1, Omnivoursness: Classifying Food

(3) Optional: Tales of the Field, Pages 13-44 

• Is Participant Observation really a method?
• Structuring an interview
• Developing rapport
• Authentic Interaction and embodiment
• Barriers to authentic interaction
• Classifying food
• Food Rules
• The Omnivore's Dilemma
• Evolution and the human diet
• value, meaning, and edibility
• food classification and the social order
• food prohibitions
• ideology and public discourse on nutrition
• dietary choices and the individual

Exercises in Ethnography #2: Due 1/28 at midnight on PackBack.-5%

Food is such an important, driving force in our lives. We share and create some of our most important stories surrounded by food. It comforts us, nourishes us, and heals us. So far, I haven’t met anyone who didn’t have one special dish or fond food memory to look back on. For this assignment, share a detailed food memory by creating a personal food narrative..

III. Fieldnotes: How to Observe and record your findings (1/29-31)

Readings:

(1) Blog Posts

(2) Eating Culture, Chapter 2, Settled Ingredients

• Participant Observation
• Jottings
• Ethics in fieldwork
• Domestic food production
• food strategies and cuisine
• localized ingredients and food culture
• food sharing in social groups
• origins of domestication
• intensification of production and social change

Exercises in Ethnography #3: Due 2/4 by midnight on Packback -5%

Attend a meal or food festival for your taget population and carry out participant observations. While you are there, take a stop watch. Spend about 5 minutes each describing what you "see", "hear", "smell", "touch" and "taste". Try to make your sensory descriptions as rich as possible.

IV. Ethics and the Practice of Ethnography (2/5-7)

Readings:

(1) Ethics in Anthropology (8 minute u-tube video)

(2) Ethics Handbook AAA (skim through this, especially the parts that arent for teaching)

• ethics in fieldwork

Exercises in Ethnography #4: The Problem of Ethics studying a marginalized population.(Due 2/11 at midnight ) on Packback-5%

After reading the material for this week, what are the most important ethical considerations for your study this semester? What specific steps will you take to ensure that your are doing ethical research?

V. The Spatial Gaze: Case Studies in Ethnography (2/12-14)

Readings: 

(1) Eating Culture, Chapter 3, Mobile Ingredients

• Studying at Home
• The perceiver and the Perceived
• Learning to "look"
• Styles: writing "realist" tales
• Agriculture and its discontents
• cuisines and nationalism
• wage labor and workers diet
• global food industry
• Cost of industrial agriculture

Exercises in Ethnography #5: Cuisines and Nationalism (due 2/18 at midnight on Packback)-5%

Interview 3 people about the most important ingredients in their food culture. Why are these ingredients essential and what importance do they hold within the culture? Are they thought to have value outside of nurishment? If so, what are these valuable qualities? Are these ingredients locally grown? Where are these ingredients acquired?

VI. Researching People: The Collaborative Listener* (2/19-21)

Readings:

(1) Eating Culture, Chapter 4, Cooks and Kitchens

• Skills for collaborative listening
• Cooking techniques and aesthetics
• food acquisition and gender roles
• food and cultural meaning making
• cooking and gender roles
• men as chefs and national cuisines
• food industry and industrial cuisines
• Everyday conotations and cooking

 Exercises in Ethnography #6: Cooking and Gender Roles Due 2/25 at midninght on Packback-5% 

After reading the chapter in the text, interview 3 different people (different cultures/ethnicities) about cooking and gender roles. Are there special occasions, or dishes in which one gender cooks as opposed to another? What is similar in these depictions and what is different?

VII. Recipes and Dishes (2/26-28)  

Readings: Eating Culture, Chapter 5, Recipes and Dishes

• The origins of recipes
• oral versus textual cooking traditions
• recipes, cuisines, and wealth
• cookbooks, cuisine, and nation building
• culinary authenticity
• evolution and culinary contimuity

Exercises in Ethnography #7: Finding Themes/Stable Core (Due 3/3 at midnight on Packback)-5%

Recipes. After you have collected a number of interviews, identify a theme which is commented on in a number of "stories" from informants. 

• what is the stable core of these stories?
• What are the contested areas?
• What can explain these different memories or tellings?

VII. Eating and Etiquette Traditions (3/4)

Readings:

(1) Eating Culture, Chapter 6, Eating In: Commensality and Gastro-politics

• Commensality, social relations, and identity work
• patterns of meals
• meals and cuisines
• meals and exchange
• feasts
• gastro-politics through everyday meals and feasts

Exercises in Ethnography #8: Autoethnography. Due 3/10 at midnight on PackBack -5%

For this assignment you should write a personal food narrative that encapsulates how you feel about a certain food or food tradition. Make sure you consider every feature of the food's meaning that makes it important to you. (e.g., who cooked it, it's taste, an important event, an important relationship, its specialness, if it is part of your identity, etc.) Include as much DETAIL (thick description) in your description as possible. Auto-ethnography, like all narratives are written in the first person. No footnotes are required for this assignment.

                  NO CLASS-- SPRING BREAK 3/6-16

VIII. Researching Language: The Cultural Translator (3/18-20)

Readings:

(1) Blog posts

• Street lingo-what verbal language tells us about culture
• Body language and culture-moving to the beat of a different drummer
• Using insider language
• verbal performance
• recording dialogue

Exercises in Ethnography #9: Due 3/24 at midnight on PackBack -5%

IX. Creative Non-fiction: Telling the Tales (3/25-27)

Readings:

(1) Eating Culture, Chapter 7, Eating Out: Gastronomy

• Realist Tales
• Confessional Tales
• Impressionistic Tales
• Dining at home versus dining out
• origin of public eating culture
• restaurant meals and identity work
• gastronomy and cuisines
• cuisine as economic resources
• "ethnic" restaurants
• restaurants and authenticity

Exercises in Ethnography #10: Eating in and eating Out (3/29 at midnight on Packback)-5%

XI. Catch up Class (4/1)

TBA

                               NO CLASS-- ADVISING 4/1

XII. Global Indigestion: Food Insecurity(4/8-10)

Readings:

(1) Eating Culture, Chapter 8 Global Indigestion

• Agendas for Food Security
• FAO and WHO
• Challenges to security
• grass roots responses to food insecurity
• The Four Pillars approach

Exercises in Ethnography # 11 (Due 4/14 on Packback)-5%

XIII. Local Digestion (4/15-17)

(1) Eating Culture, Chapter 9, Local Digestion: Making the Global at Home

• Global production, distribution and Consumption
• Assigning local values and meanings
• localization of global foods
• locavourism  as a revitalization movement
• supermarkets and farmers markets movement
• Ethical consumption

Exercises in Ethnography # 12 (due 4/21 at midnight on PackBack)-5%

XIV. Leftovers (4/22-24)

(1) Eating Culture, Epilogue: Leftovers 

• Ethnography of Food  Recap
• Leftovers
• what to do with surplus
• cleaning up

Final Presentations/Ethnographic Portfolios 4/24

Final Ethnography Assignment- Ethnographic Food Portfolios: (Due 4/28)-30%

GRADING:

• 11 ethnographic Exercises                                          55%
• Final Food Ethnography Portfolio                            30%
• Class attendance, preparation, and participation    15%

TOTAL*                                                                                  100%

*Grades will not be on Blackboard. This course does not utilize Blackboard. Instead, please keep a record of your grades. Each paper will contain a percentile for which it is weighted. For example, each ethnographic assignment is worth 10% of your grade.  I do not use numerical grading. I am a qualitative researcher. I will award you a grade for each assignment and average those grades to your advantage based on your participation in class and your preparation and effort this term. Please feel free AT ANY MOMENT, to meet with me about your grade (as it stands) for the term. 

Note as well, that although I love you all and want you to succeed, I am NOT YOUR MOTHER. That means I will NOT BE CHASING AFTER YOU for your assignments. (I will reach out to note if you are ok), and then expect work to be submitted on time (or late) at your adult discretion. Your grade will reflect your decisions on this matter. PLEASE feel free to reach out at any time if you are struggling. I know how difficult it is for some of you right now (as it is for me). I will try to assist you if I am able, or refer you to the proper services.

Professor Greene's (Laurie's) CELL (609) 214.659

Getting on PackBack

Packback Deep Dives

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For a brief introduction to Packback Questions and why we are using it in class, watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OV7QmikrD68