SAFN is pleased to announce that our Food Anthropologist of the Year and distinguished speaker for 2012 is Penny Van Esterik. With work ranging from the politics of breast feeding to food culture in Southeast Asia, Van Esterik’s work in the anthropology of food has tread new ground and inspired a generation of young food anthropologists. Van Esterik is Professor of Anthropology at York University. She is the author of Beyond the Breast-Bottle Controversy (1989) and Food Culture in Southeast Asia (2008), and co-editor of Food and Culture: A Reader (3rd Edition, 2012).
Join us on Saturday, Nov. 17 at 6:15pm at the SAFN Business Meeting to hear Penny Van Esterik speak about her latest research:
The Dance of Nurture
Van Esterik’s presentation takes a personal look at nurture and how its absence in food
studies and anthropology in general robs us of one opportunity to take the
discipline in new directions. She uses breastfeeding and young child feeding to
rethink the importance of nurture and examine how it challenges basic
assumptions in contemporary anthropology. While we are clear on how
anthropology contributes to food studies, how can nutritional anthropology and
food studies contribute to anthropology as a discipline? Van Esterik draws some tentative
answers from The Dance of Nurture, an unfinished interrupted manuscript that
provides a framework for exploring this subject.
FoodAnthropology 