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""The Life of Cheese" is the definitive work on America's artisanal food revolution. Heather Paxson's engaging stories are as rich, sharp, and well-grounded as the product she scrutinizes. A must read for anyone interested in fostering a sustainable food system." Warren Belasco, author of "Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food" "Heather Paxson's lucid and engaging book, "The Life of Cheese," is a gift to anyone interested in exploring the wonderful and wonderfully complex realities of artisan cheesemaking in the United States. Paxson deftly integrates careful considerations of the importance of sentiment, value and craft to the work of cheesemakers with vivid stories and lush descri...
Publisher Description
Cheese is alive, and alive with meaning. Heather Paxson’s beautifully written anthropological study of American artisanal cheesemaking tells the story of how craftwork has become a new source of cultural and economic value for producers as well as consumers. Dairy farmers and artisans inhabit a world in which their colleagues and collaborators are a wild cast of characters, including plants, animals, microorganisms, family members, employees, and customers. As "unfinished" commodities, living products whose qualities are not fully settled, handmade cheeses embody a mix of new and old ideas about taste and value. By exploring the life of cheese, Paxson helps rethink the politics of food, land, and labor today.
A new approach to writing culture has arrived: multispecies ethnography. Plants, animals, fungi, and microbes appear alongside humans in this singular book about natural and cultural history. Anthropologists have collaborated with artists and biological scientists to illuminate how diverse organisms are entangled in political, economic, and cultural systems. Contributions from influential writers and scholars, such as Dorion Sagan, Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, are featured along with essays by emergent artists and cultural anthropologists. Delectable mushrooms flourishing in the aftermath of ecological disaster, microbial cultures enlivening the politics and value o...
This comprehensive anthology presents 40 readings that are critical to an understanding of anthropological theory and the development of anthropology as an academic discipline. The readings have broad anthropological appeal, emphasizing social and cultural anthropology. The third edition has been completely revised throughout and organized to work more closely alongside the companion overview text, A History of Anthropological Theory. It includes six new readings as well as two original essays written by contemporary anthropologists on "Why Theory Matters." These new essays help ground the more abstract readings in the collection. The glossary has been significantly expanded and the discussion questions have been revised. The result is a volume that offers not only a strong foundation in the history of the discipline but also a good overview of developments in twentieth- and twenty-first-century anthropological theory, including feminist anthropology, postmodernity, medical anthropology, globalization, postcolonialism, and public anthropology.
DIVEthnographic studies of the role of sexuality and gender in development discourse and policy./div
"Eating Beside Ourselves expands the work of food studies by approaching eating and feeding as sites of transformation across a diversity of bodies and selves. In turning organic substance into food, acts of eating create webs of relations, interconnected and organized by relative conditions of edibility, through which eaters may in turn become eaten. Focusing on such relations, this volume explores how eating and feeding mediate thresholds between different conditions or states of being (e.g., living/dying; edible/inedible); between organisms of different species; and between living beings and their surrounding environment. The volume is organized around the analytic of the "threshold," which the contributors mobilize to think about how food serves as a threshold for human and inhuman relations. In addition to the single-authored chapters, the volume contains five conversational exchanges, which offers contributors the opportunity to discuss their work and the themes of the volume"--
Wilk and his colleagues draw upon their own international field experience to examine how food systems are changing around the globe. The authors offer a cultural perspective that is missing in other economic and developmental studies, and provide rich ethnographic data on markets, industrial production, and food economies. This new book will appeal to professionals in economic and environmental anthropology: economic development, agricultural economics, consumer behavior, nutritional sciences, environmental sustainability, and globalization studies.
Offering the first broadly comparative analysis of place-based labeling and marketing systems, Knowing Where It Comes From examines the way claims about the origins and meanings of traditional foods get made around the world, from Italy and France to Costa Rica and Thailand. It also highlights the implications of different systems for both producers and consumers. Labeling regimes have moved beyond intellectual property to embrace community-based protections, intangible cultural heritage, cultural landscapes, and indigenous knowledge. Reflecting a rich array of juridical, regulatory, and activist perspectives, these approaches seek to level the playing field on which food producers and consumers interact.
Food - its cultivation, preparation and communal consumption - has long been considered a form of cultural heritage. A dynamic, living product, food creates social bonds as it simultaneously marks off and maintains cultural difference. In bringing together anthropologists, historians and other scholars of food and heritage, this volume closely examines the ways in which the cultivation, preparation, and consumption of food is used to create identity claims of 'cultural heritage' on local, regional, national and international scales. Contributors explore a range of themes, including how food is used to mark insiders and outsiders within an ethnic group; how the same food's meanings change wit...