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The Seven Spices: Pumpkins, Puritans, And Pathogens In Colonial New England, Michael Sharbaugh
The Seven Spices: Pumpkins, Puritans, And Pathogens In Colonial New England, Michael Sharbaugh
Michael D Sharbaugh
Water sources in the United States' New England region are laden with arsenic. Particularly during North America's colonial period--prior to modern filtration processes--arsenic would make it into the colonists' drinking water. In this article, which evokes the biocultural evolution paradigm, it is argued that colonists offset health risks from the contaminant (arsenic poisoning) by ingesting copious amounts of seven spices--cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, cardamom, allspice, vanilla, and ginger. The inclusion of these spices in fall and winter recipes that hail from New England would therefore explain why many Americans associate them not only with the region, but with Thanksgiving and Christmas, …
Classifications In Their Social Context / Book Review, Terence Hays
Classifications In Their Social Context / Book Review, Terence Hays
Terence Hays
Since Durkheim and Mauss, the study of folk classification has developed along two main lines: the predominantly British and French "soocial constructionist" tradition, and the largely American "ethnoscience" approach, to use Roy Ellen's designations (p. 4). Ellen is referring to the continuing contrast in the anthropological literature between analyses of folk classification systems which view them as primarily reflecting structural, sociological, cosmological, or symbolic concerns, and those which concentrate on the more mundane orderings of nature which employ perceptual (usually morphological) criteria.