Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons^™

Cooking In The Past And For The Future In Latin America, Clare A. Sammells

Faculty Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

"Yes Mom, I'M Eating": Foodways Among An International Cohort, Tessa Sergile

Senior Theses

This research demonstrates different ways an individual’s habits around food change when exposed to new environments. It uses a combination of first-person sources and existing literature to draw conclusions surrounding the patterns of change in food preparation and consumption. A series of interviews were conducted and recorded to collect the information used in the thesis. The interview participants were college-aged students who had spent 6 < months in a foreign country. Most were participants of the IBEA cohort of South Carolina, a program where students around the world came together as a group to study at multiple universities over two years. Interviews were based on an interview guide that was refined throughout the process. There were a total of 33 interviews, with participants hailing from six different countries. The results of the interviews demonstrated that individuals exhibited varying types of behavior based on their own viewpoints towards cooking and meals, as well as the environment they were exposed to during meal preparation. This information was used to create a matrix to classify individuals based on their inspirations in cooking, and their use of home habits. The results lead to an additional category of “Unconscious Preparation” being proposed to the existing subcategories of food preparation. Further analysis of the data collected is also encouraged. This research adds depth to the present literature since it deals with individuals who are in foreign environments for the short-term, before moving away. Current literature mainly focuses on immigrants who move away from their homeland permanently (Brown and Mussell, 1984; Goode, Theophano and Curtis, 1984; Kalčik, 1984; Singer, 1984). It adds a new consideration to how we approach mealtimes when we are in a foreign environment and helps define different approaches that people may take when preparing food away from where they grew up. These findings could be used for other students studying abroad to better determine how their mealtime habits may change. There is also literature in Gottlieb and Rossi (1961), which describes similar effects in the military, whose style of travel and living is similar to that of an international student, meaning the results could also be interesting to the government when trying to plan for meals served to active-duty personnel abroad.

Food As A Vector For Change: Lessons From The Third Sector On Improving Livelihoods With Nutritional Knowledge In Medellín And Bogotá, Solomon Treister

Honors Theses

In this thesis I argue that improving diet in communities depends on building nutritional knowledge. In examining the role of community level organizations, I look specifically at how knowledge is conveyed through agriculture and gastronomy. This project analyzes how civil society organizations work to reintegrate individuals into food systems, compelling consumers to take agency over their diets and pursue better livelihoods. The industrialization of food systems has fundamentally changed the way humans connect with food and diet. In Colombia, internal displacements and urban migration have accelerated a loss of connection with the land and food processes. At the same time, …

Navigating The Cairene Table: Food And Family Between What Is Ideal And What Is Real, Iman Afify

Theses and Dissertations

Our daily encounters with food, especially during our childhood, play a crucial role in shaping and informing our identity and our habitus. In this research, by using multimodal and auto ethnography, I argue that due to the guiding path that our senses carve for us, we make sense and contextualise our surroundings through our senses, and not only the five senses of vision, smell, taste, hearing, and touch, but also through our inner senses of time and temporality, and how time and memory play an important role in the registration of our surroundings through our bodies and senses. I am …

Toxicants, Entanglement, And Mitigation In New England’S Emerging Circular Economy For Food Waste, Cindy Isenhour, Michael Haedicke, Brieanne Berry, Jean Macrae, Travis Blackmer, Skyler Horton

Anthropology Faculty Scholarship

Drawing on research with food waste recycling facilities in New England, this paper explores a fundamental tension between the eco-modernist logics of the circular economy and the reality of contemporary waste streams. Composting and digestion are promoted as key solutions to food waste, due to their ability to return nutrients to agricultural soils. However, our work suggests that food waste processors increasingly find themselves responsible for policing boundaries between distinct “material” and “biological” systems as imagined by the architects of the circular economy—boundaries penetrable by toxicants. This responsibility creates significant problems for processors due to the regulatory, educational, and structural …

Cultural Food Habits As A Social Factor Of Health Among Immigrants In New Haven, Connecticut: A Focused Ethnographic Study, Luke Anderson

University Scholar Projects

Diet-related health disparities are well documented in immigrant populations. This study aims to help better inform nutrition interventions. It did so by working with migrant members of the New Haven community to explore their perceptions of the nutrition of the food they eat and relate it to how this food is grounded in their cultural identity and social belonging.

Dim Sum And The Chinese Diaspora, Ashley Lee

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Dim sum originated from the southern states of China, mainly Hong Kong and Guangdong. The Chinese cuisine has traveled to many places in the world today where Chinese immigrants have settled since the Chinese diaspora circa the 1960s. At the time, Chinese immigrants who came to America had to assimilate to the American culture by situating themselves in areas that had already existed, creating ethnic enclaves in Chinatown, Los Angeles. The heavy population of Chinese immigrants poured into the San Gabriel Valley, which created a bigger community for the Chinese and preserved the Chinese identity. It was easier for them …

Passing Down The Rolling Pin: Lefse, Memory, And A Norwegian-American Identity, Rebecca Garbe

Scandinavian Studies Student Award

This paper explores the intersections between memory and food-making and how they inform a Norwegian-American cultural identity. Based on fieldwork done in June and July of 2019 in Fosston, Minnesota, I use lefse, a Norwegian potato-based flatbread, as a focal point, for analysis. I argue that lefse-making in Fosston acts as a medium through which residents engage with a collective memory of an immigrant heritage. This traditional food-making, I assert, relies on knowledge passed down through and across family lines allowing food-makers and eaters to experience an embodied connection to their cultural past. Investigating my own Norwegian heritage, I draw …

Rewriting The Haggadah: Judaism For Those Who Hold Food Close, Rose Noël Wax

Senior Projects Spring 2020

American Jews, specifically those who do not observe, often turn towards food as a performance of Jewish identity, both publicly and privately. Longing for roots, these Jews reach for a piece of Jewish culture that can make them not only feel Jewish, but also grounded in a longstanding tradition that explicitly ties Judaism to a dynamic food culture. In doing so they invent traditions, creating habits sometimes loosely based in prescribed or familial tradition, sometimes not at all. In this way, food, through invented traditions, allows modern non- observant American Jews to make their Jewish identity tangible.

Kumain Na Tayo! Exploring The Role Of Food In Communicating Tradition And Instilling Familial Values, Aaron Negrillo

Student Research

As a core part of Asian values, family plays a huge role in developing the individual’s identity. Family strongly contributes to the passing down of traditions and values. The expression of cultural values can be observed through many surface-level interactions such as food and meal rituals. This auto-ethnography explores the link between food and culture, specifically how it serves as a vehicle of communication that passes down traditions and values. The underlying core values of hospitality, respect, and sacrifice stand emerged from the thematic analysis conducted. Overall, food can be understood as a tangible expression of love: creating something for …

Currents Of Consumption: How National Narratives Of Japanese Cuisine Collide With Localized Forms Of Sushi In Northern California, John Ostermiller

Master's Projects and Capstones

This paper examines how national narratives of Japanese cuisine collide with the expectations, preferences, and perceptions of American consumers (particularly Northern California). The global economy has benefited the circulation of positive images of Japan managed by the Japanese government, but the commercialization of Japanese cuisine is also at odds with government efforts. In Japan, sushi is often synonymous with nigirizushi: sliced seafood and a daub of wasabi atop vinegared rice. As part of Japan’s washoku tradition, this singular image of sushi (allegedly) reflects the deepest essence of Japanese cultural sensibilities tied to simplicity, perfection, and nature. But in America, consumers’ …

Food And Negotiation Of Identity Among The Russian Immigrant Community Of Brighton Beach, Elena Starkova

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the construction of ethnic identity among Russian immigrants in New York, by examining how it has been negotiated and articulated through foods, including traditional and non-native foods as a vehicle for their shifting identities and for reaffirming their position and participation in mainstream American society.

The Diet And Subsistence Methods Of The Maya: Their Health And Cultural Consequences From The Pre-Classic Era To Today, Rachel E. Watson

Honors Undergraduate

The Maya, a once great civilization, seemingly vanished without an obvious reason, before the Spanish landed in the region. Some say that their downfall was a result of famine and inadequate nutrition. Surprisingly, most of the archaeological evidence surrounding the Classic Maya diet and subsistence methods indicates that they both adequately sustained the population to the point where there has been practically no change over hundreds of years. Change did not occur to the Maya diet or the classic subsistence methods until the late twentieth century when the tourism industry exploded in the area of the former Maya empire. The …

Into Ireland: An Analysis Of Cultural Hybridity, Immigration, Food, And Place In The Silicon Docks Market In Dublin, Ireland, Grace Katharine Elizabeth Myers

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Ireland is still recovering from the Great Recession that devastated much of the world in 2007. Simultaneously, the country is also dealing with increasing diversity and multiculturalism during a time of rising economic stability. This thesis analyzes the effects of globalization on the local expressions and perceptions of changing cultural identities through an examination of interactions between Irish patrons and Non-Irish vendors and employees in a weekly lunchtime food market located in the Silicon Docks Business Park in Dublin, Ireland. The actions which occur in the market demonstrate the influences of cross-cultural contact and heterogeneity on the Irish display of …

The Antipolitics Of Food In Middle-Class America, Neri De Kramer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation provides an ethnographic account of the food and parenting practices of a diverse group of middle-class families in the Mount Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia. It starts from the basic premise that the economic pressures on the American middle classes find expression in family life around the socially reproductive work of choosing food and parenting.

The current economic climate marked with extreme and rising income inequality, low growth, high unemployment and stagnating wages has complicated the reproduction process for all parents in this study, regardless of income. Scholars have described how this concern for the future of the next …

You Are What You (Can) Eat: Cultivating Resistance Through Food, Justice, And Gardens On The South Side Of Chicago, Ida B. Kassa

Pomona Senior Theses

Though food is widely recognized as a basic necessity for humanity, disparate access to it highlights whose bodies, environments, health, nutrition, and utter existence has mattered most in American society—and whose has mattered the least. Through interviews with residents of the South Side of Chicago about the alternative food pathway they’ve forged for themselves, we learn that food becomes much more than just sustenance. Interviewees describe our present day food system as undeniably rooted in a history of enslavement and exploitation of Black and Brown bodies; they regard food justice work by communities of color as an important source of …

Food And Diet In The Andes: Changing Markets And Lives In Nuñoa, James A. Fisher

Masters Theses

The town of Nuñoa, located in the southern Peruvian Andes, has been the ongoing focus of anthropological research. Household surveys of diet and food security (n=69) administered during 2012 are analyzed here and compared to past studies from previous decades. Study results show clearly that the amount and diversity of new foods available in the area has increased dramatically, but also gives evidence for continued disparate access to certain types of food along class lines. Socioeconomic status had a significant negative correlation with food insecurity and poor households more frequently consumed both potatoes and other cheap, high carbohydrate foods such …

Care And The Self: Theorizing The Significance Of Food In Rural Yucatan, Lauren Wynne

Anthropology and Sociology Faculty Publications

In this essay, the author describes her dissertation fieldwork, focusing on human relationships with food, in rural Yucatan, Mexico.

Ang 6469 Anthropology Of Food, Roberta Baer

Service-Learning Syllabi

No abstract provided.

Water Resources And The Historic Wells Of Barbuda: Tradition, Heritage And Hope For A Sustainable Future, Rebecca Boger, Sophia Perdikaris, Amy E. Potter, John Mussington, Reginald Murphy, Louise Thomas, Calvin Gore, Dwight Finch

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

The island of Barbuda has a relatively unique history, land tenure and geography. Unlike its Caribbean counterparts, the island is not suited to large-scale agriculture due to its arid climate and relatively thin soils. Instead, the enslaved and eventually free people of Barbuda developed a complex herding ecology centered on common land ownership. As a result, carefully designed historic wells are strategically located around the island. With the challenges brought about by climate change, an interdisciplinary, international team led by the Barbuda Research Complex is investigating the state of existing water and food resources and examining how the availability and …

The Spirituality Of Food And Nutrition: A Critique Of The United States' Food Practices Through An Analysis Of Three Asian Religions And Philosophies, Kiley G. Hagerty

Senior Theses and Projects

There is no question that the United States is a country that is currently faced with serious health epidemics, such as hypertension and diabetes, associated with being overweight and obese. It has been the assumption of the government and the public that the large food corporations are to blame for the country’s poor health. However, it is too simplistic to believe that tighter regulations upon corporations would alone lead to improved health. There needs to be a change at the individual level, and of the practices of most of the country’s citizens. Through an analysis of three Asian religions (Hindu …

Babette's Feast And The Goodness Of God, Thomas J. Curry

Journal of Religion & Film

This article attempts to answer the preeminent question Babette’s Feast invites viewers to consider: Why does Babette choose to expend everything she has to make her feast? Of the critical studies made of the film, few have considered analytically crucial the catastrophic backstory of Babette, the violence of which is implied and offscreen. Appreciation of the singularity of Babette’s own personhood and the darker aspects of her experience, and not only how she might act as a figure of Christ, are key to understanding the motivating force behind her meal and its transformative effect: That through the feast Babette lays …

From Pupusas To Chimichangas: Exploring The Ways In Which Food Contributes To The Creation Of A Pan-Latino Identity, Sarah B. Fouts

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Framed through the standardizations of food and generalizations of people, this research explores the shifting ingredients of migrant identities and the ethnic foodways carried with them as they cross the border into the United States. Using ethnographic observational fieldwork, content analysis of menus, and semi-structured interviews with restaurant staff and migrant workers, this study examines the transnational narratives of the day laborer population and their deterritorialized food culture in post-Katrina New Orleans. Further, this research explores this flow of people and culture through a globalization lens in order to achieve a more holistic understanding of the “migrant experience” and how …

Cracker Barrel's Culture: Exporting The South On America's Interstate Exits, Susan Nicola Penman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Cracker Barrel Old Country Store® is a chain restaurant and gift shop with its origins in the South. Formed in 1969 in Lebanon, Tennessee, its success story is one that has much to do with how the company has decided to market and advertise itself along regional lines. This thesis explores the regional elements in Cracker Barrel's language, products, and reputation. It focuses on the company's geographic origins, its history and company lore, and the impact of imitating a historically segregated space (the "old country store"). In addition to that, an integral part of this thesis is the role of …

Recipes Of Resolve: Food And Meaning In Post-Diluvian New Orleans, Jessica Claire Menck

Antioch University Full-Text Dissertations & Theses

In 2005 the city of New Orleans experienced catastrophic flooding as a result of the failure of the federal levee system following Hurricane Katrina. This was an immediate disaster that evolved into a longer-term crisis as the city, state, and national government struggled to respond to the event. This study focuses on one part of managing crisis: meaning making. Specifically, the study investigates meaning making within the food community of New Orleans, asking the questions: is food a way for individuals and groups to make meaning following critical change events such as the failure of the federal levee system in …

Turkey Backbones And Chicken Gizzards: Women’S Roles And The Making Of A Soup King In Post Socialist Hungary, Lisa Pope Fischer

Publications and Research

This article looks at soup making as a lens to view the impact of societal change for Hungarian pensioner women. Food as a practice illustrates agency: strategies and tactics used in time and space to communicate meaning for people in everyday life. During the Socialist period women endured frustrations of long lines and scarce resources. Post socialism, their heroic clout as food providers is diminished by the introduction of a market economy. However, the survival skills learned in the socialist era allow them to adapt to the new era of high inflation, and high unemployment. I use descriptions of one …

Pennsylvania Folklife Vol. 46, No. 3, Don Yoder, Alfred L. Shoemaker, Paul R. Wieand, Earl F. Robacker, Ada Robacker, Herbert H. Beck, Edna Eby Heller, Vincent R. Tortora, Frances Lichten

Pennsylvania Folklife Magazine

• Two Worlds in the Dutch Country
• Belsnickel Lore
• Carpet-Rag Parties
• Quilting Traditions in the Dutch Country
• Lititz
• Lititz Specialties
• Amish Funerals
• Pennsylvania Redware
• Scratch-Carved Easter Eggs
• Fractur From the Hostetter Collection

Pennsylvania Folklife Vol. 45, No. 1, Joan Saverino, Joseph Bentivegna, Nicholas V. De Leo, Catherine Cerrone, Janet Theophano

Pennsylvania Folklife Magazine

• "Domani Ci Zappa": Italian Immigration and Ethnicity in Pennsylvania
• A Study of the San Cataldesi Who Emigrated to Dunmore, Pennsylvania
• A Look at the Early Years of Philadelphia's "Little Italy"
• "An Aura of Toughness, Too": Italian Immigration to Pittsburgh and Vicinity
• Expressions of Love, Acts of Labor: Women's Work in an Italian American Community

Pennsylvania Folklife Vol. 44, No. 2, Susan Kalcik, June Granatir Alexander, M. Mark Stolarik, Corinne Earnest, Klaus Stopp, Jobie E. Riley

Pennsylvania Folklife Magazine

• Fortune's Stepchildren: Slovaks in Pennsylvania
• Slovak Churches: Religious Diversity and Ethnic Communities
• Slovak Fraternal-Benefit Societies in Pennsylvania
• Early Fraktur Referring to Birth and Baptism in Pennsylvania: A Taufpatenbrief from Berks County for a Child Born in 1751
• The Solitary Sisters of Saron

Pennsylvania Folklife Vol. 42, No. 1, Marion Lois Huffines, Amos Long Jr., Robert P. Stevenson, Robert L. Leight

Pennsylvania Folklife Magazine

• The Trunk in the Attic was a Window
• The Rural Pennsylvania-German Home and Family
• The Happy Story of Georges Creek
• Duties of a Rural School Board at the Turn of the Century
• Aldes un Neies (Old and New)