You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Culinary Nostalgia is the first Western-language book to explore the unique significance that the Chinese people attach to their country's many distinct regional foods, as well as the shifting roles that Western food plays in urban life. Author Mark Swislocki focuses on Shanghai—a food lover's paradise—as a rich intersection of urban, regional, and national identities, and examines how tastes registered change and continuity at pivotal moments throughout the city's history. From the earliest accounts of Shanghai's specialty foodstuffs to the dazzling variety of regional cuisines and restaurants in the metropolis of today, this book uncovers how city residents have constructed their relationship to the city itself, to other parts of China, and to the wider world. This new history of Shanghai develops an original framework for studying food culture as an intrinsic part of the way Chinese people connect to the past, live in the present, and imagine a future.
How have Jews experienced their environments and how have they engaged with specific places? How do Jewish spaces emerge, how are they contested, performed and used? With these questions in mind, this anthology focuses on the production of Jewish space and lived Jewish spaces and sheds light on their diversity, inter-connectedness and multi-dimensionality. By exploring historical and contemporary case studies from around the world, the essays collected here shift the temporal focus generally applied to Jewish civilization to a spatially oriented perspective. The reader encounters sites such as the gardens cultivated in the Ghettos during World War II, the Israeli development town of Netivot,...
This book observes the growing importance of individual well-being for collective health in socialist China and the limitations this brought on the authorities. Engaging with contemporary popular media discourse—including handbooks and magazine articles on health and health practices—to demonstrate how biomedical knowledge was ingrained in the readership, this book uncovers the detailed path to health propagated by state media for the Chinese population. This authority-sanctioned discussion opened up a space for talking about a body entwined with production and the personal experience of daily life. Nutrition, exercise, and rest were the main fields in which the party– state encouraged...
Why are some popular musical forms and performers universally reviled by critics and ignored by scholars-despite enjoying large-scale popularity? How has the notion of what makes "good" or "bad" music changed over the years-and what does this tell us about the writers who have assigned these tags to different musical genres? Many composers that are today part of the classical "canon" were greeted initially by bad reviews. Similarly, jazz, country, and pop musics were all once rejected as "bad" by the academy that now has courses on these and many other types of music. This book addresses why this is so through a series of essays on different musical forms and performers. It looks at alternate ways of judging musical performance beyond the critical/academic nexus, and suggests new paths to follow in understanding what makes some music "popular" even if it is judged to be "bad." For anyone who has ever secretly enjoyed ABBA, Kenny G, or disco, Bad Music will be a guilty pleasure!
In the early twentieth century, a time of political fragmentation and social upheaval in China, poverty became the focus of an anguished national conversation about the future of the country. Investigating the lives of the urban poor in China during this critical era, Guilty of Indigence examines the solutions implemented by a nation attempting to deal with "society's most fundamental problem." Interweaving analysis of shifting social viewpoints, the evolution of poor relief institutions, and the lived experiences of the urban poor, Janet Chen explores the development of Chinese attitudes toward urban poverty and of policies intended for its alleviation. Chen concentrates on Beijing and Shan...
Emphasizes time between 1950s and 1970s in rural southern and central Shanxi province.
According to imperial edict in pre-modern China, an elementary school was to be established in every village in the empire for any boy to attend. This book looks at how the schools worked, how they changed over time, and who promoted them and why. Over the course of the Ming period (1368-1644), schools were sponsored first by the emperor, then by the central bureaucracy, then by local officials, and finally by the people themselves. The changing uses of schools helps us to understand how the Ming state related to society over the course of nearly 300 years, and what they can show us about community and political debates then and now.
The Age of Dissent argues that the defining feature of the Age of Revolutions in Latin America was the emergence of dissent as an inescapable component of political life. While contestation and seditious ideas had always been present in the region, never before had local regimes been forced to consider radical dissension as an unavoidable dimension of politics. Focusing on urban Chile between the first anticolonial conspiracy of 1780 and the consolidation of an authoritarian regime in 1833, the book argues that this revolution was caused by how people practiced communication and framed its power.
This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2015. A myriad of fresh possibilities is offered when researching in food studies. Just like any other area of knowledge, researchers here breathe the present because they have already absorbed the past and can easily try to devise the future. As the question of authenticity and adaptability rises urgently, we gain knowledge of the specificities where cultural heritage faces assimilation from other lifestyles, in an effort to save and reshape the community and its cultural identity. Food researchers have also struggled with the constructions and measuring of tastes within diverse communities by comparison to other references, even though it has become harder to discern matters from expert advice and controlled mediation. Therefore, we invariably come across the power of representations, in deep association with culture and the society that produces them, for there are increasingly complex food systems bearing diverse layers of meaning.
The second edition of this concise survey offers a comparative and comprehensive study of culinary cultures and food politics throughout the world, from ancient times to the present day. It examines the long history of globalization of foods as well as the political, social, and environmental implications of our changing relationship with food, showing how hunger and taste have been driving forces in human history. Including numerous case studies from diverse societies and periods, Food in World History explores such questions as: What social factors have historically influenced culinary globalization? How did early modern plantations establish patterns for modern industrial food production?...