ANTHROP 1AA3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 12: Sidney Mintz
14 Sep 2016
School
Department
Course
Professor
Food:
• A form of material culture
o Material culture: anything made or modified by humans
o Artifact: portable forms of material culture
• Certain types of food are commodities which are things that acquire value in a culture and can be bought and sold
in a capitalist/market economy
o all commodities have use value or exchange value
• sugar
o exploitation of environment and labour in colonial and contemporary contexts
o Sidney Mintz: history of sugar and consumption in Europe
• all commodities participate in 3 phases of economic exchange
o production
o distribution
o consumption
• why is it difficult to change of consumption patterns?
o Encultured into a lifestyle
o Certain foods becoming comforting
o Involves supporting local workers
o Consumption/shopping presented as pleasurable and fun
• food classification systems
o edible-inedible
o hot-cold
o male-female
o wet-dry
• hot and cold classification
o Latin America and Asia
o From greek theory of health (4 humours)
▪ Humour: is a theory about how the body works
• Blood
• Yellow bile
• Black bile
• water
o Health is the balance of opposing elements
▪ basic idea in greek, Indian, Chinese, Arabic medical systems
• food preferences: likes/dislikes
• food restriction: periodic denial of certain foods
• food taboos: deliberate avoidance of a food for reasons other than dislike; due to a cultural reason
o pigs
▪ symbolic/interpretive perspective: ancient Hebrews classified pigs as unclean
▪ adaptive/materialist perspective: pigs could not be raised in the environment of the middle east
o cows
▪ used for farming
o universal taboo against eating humans
• how do we explain food taboos?
o A marker of a group, a way to separate a group from others (identity)
o Protection against disease
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
