SSI1 154 | The Anthropology of Food and Eating

The quarry of the anthropologist--the deep social patterns and cultural meanings that shape human existence--are often disguised, out of sight, or behind the curtain of the world as it appears before us. In seeking a vantage point from which one might glimpse these phenomena, this course follows a well-beaten anthropological path: beginning with a commonplace, everyday practice, students will work outward in scope and backward in time, constructing an informed, analytic, and critical perspective on human society and culture through the seemingly pedestrian substance of food. The course is organized around a set of key texts and a series of associated exclusions to the field. Students engage a set of readings intended to provide a vantage point on the multiple research agendas that characterize the burgeoning scholarship on food and eating. In the Spring semester version of the course, the second half of the semester is dedicated to an independent research project in which design and deploy a research project of their own design that triangulates between existing scholarship and ethnographic data they collect. Affiliate department: Sociology and Anthropology.