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

Packback Deep Dives will be used to assess independent research skills and improve academic communication through long-form writing assignments such as essays, papers, and case studies. While completing the summative writing prompts on Deep Dives, you will interact with a Research Assistant that will help you gather your notes and cite your sources, and Digital Writing Assistant for in-the-moment feedback and guidance on your writing.

How to Register on Packback:

An email invitation will be sent to you from help@packback.co prompting you to finish registration. If you don’t receive an email (be sure to check your spam), you may register by following the instructions below:

1. Create an account by navigating to https://app.packback.co and clicking “Sign up for an Account”

Note: If you already have an account on Packback you can log in with your credentials.

2. Then enter our class community’s lookup key into the “Looking to join a community you don't see here?” section in Packback at the bottom of the homepage.

Community Lookup Key: 114b2e9b-9e6b-4ead-b72e-ce4242f5efaa

3. Follow the instructions on your screen to finish your registration.

Packback requires a paid subscription. Refer to www.packback.co/product/pricing for more information.

How to Get Help from the Packback Team: 

If you have any questions or concerns about Packback throughout the semester, please read their FAQ at help.packback.co. If you need more help, contact their customer support team directly at help@packback.co. 

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