Food will be a big part of the festival. How could it not with the body as our topic? There will be a number of different panels on the topic, from conversations with chefs to discussions about food safety.
For me, a highlight of this food cluster will be an event with two great anthropologists: Martin Manalansan and Mary Weismantel. The two are leaders in the steadily growing field of food anthropology. They teach huge and immensely popular classes on the topic at Illinois and Northwestern respectively – and they have collaborated in the past based on their shared interest in the anthropology of the senses. Together, they will give us a brief on the key insights developed in the field over the last couple of years.
In a way, food has always been at the center of cultural anthropology. Such early fieldworkers as Franz Boas, Bronislaw Malinowski, and Margaret Mead all wrote about the foodstuffs they found among the groups they visited. And Claude Levi-Strauss even proposed food as the core metaphor for culture (his famous idiom of “the raw and the cooked”). But in all these treatises, food was never the object of study as such – it was part of a larger formation, maybe even a key to it.
It is only in the last two decades or so that scholars like Martin and Mary have developed specialized approaches to the anthropological study of food. And they have done so with real originality.
Martin Manalansan
Martin, who is an expert on Asian American and diasporic cultures, has championed the anthropological study of smell. To him, the olfactory signals in a number of different directions – it evokes nostalgia for homelands and engenders identities in new locales; it serves to demarcate neighborhoods and anchors racializing discourses. Smell may be fleeting, he argues, but the meanings it produces are lasting.
Mary Weismantel
Mary, for her part, is a specialist in the cultures of the Andes, where much of her work has addressed food. Her first book, in fact, was called Food, Gender, and Poverty in the Ecuadorian Andes (1989) – and it was a path-breaking study for the way it read the struggles of an indigenous parish of highland Ecuador through the lens of its diet and cuisine. As Mary showed, all the foods eaten by the community were laden with meanings that went far beyond the immediate need for sustenance.
We are what we eat, they say. But as Martin and Mary will show us, we say much more than we think when we eat.
Panel
#407: Sun, Nov. 7 2:00 - 3:00 PM
Tags: food, anthropology, culture, The Body
