Author Archives: mruthdike

by | July 31, 2017 · 5:39 pm

Robert M. Netting Best Student Paper Prize

Check out this opportunity for money and publication from our friends at the C&A section of the AAA’s for their student paper competitions. Feel free to apply or pass onto to your students!

The Culture and Agriculture section of the American Anthropological Association invites anthropology graduate and undergraduate students to submit papers for the 2017 Robert M. Netting Award. The graduate and undergraduate winners will receive cash awards of $750 and $250, respectively, and have the opportunity for a direct consultation with the editors of our section’s journal, CAFÉ (Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment), toward the goal of revising the winning papers for publication. Submissions should draw on relevant literature from any subfield of Anthropology and present data from original research related to livelihoods based on crop, livestock, or fishery production, forestry, and/or management of agricultural and environmental resources. Papers should be single-authored, limited to a maximum of 7,000 words, including endnotes, appendices, and references, and should follow Chicago format style.

Papers already published or accepted for publication are not eligible. Only one submission per student is allowed. Submitters need not be members of the American Anthropological Association but they must be enrolled students (Note: students graduating in the Spring or Summer of 2017 will also be eligible). The submission deadline is September 1st, 2017 and all submissions should be sent to Nicholas C. Kawa via email at nckawa@gmail.com. 

 

If you would like to post a CFP on the blog, please contact Ruth Dike.

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by | June 29, 2017 · 2:01 pm

Call for Chapter Proposals: More than the Madeleine

Working title: More than the Madeleine: Food in Memory and Imagination

 

Call for chapter proposals: please circulate!

 

Claude Levi-Strauss posited that food has to be “good to think” before it is “good to eat.” That contemplative moment of judgement compels us both to remember and to imagine, making the two processes an integral part of eating. Memory tells us what is safe (or not!) to eat, provides us with our culinary traditions, and is the source of our cravings. Imagination helps us to determine what to do when confronted with new substances that we have yet to classify as edible, desirable, nutritious, or delicious. Without imagination and adaptation our foodways would be predictable, boring, and static. While memory has to do with past experiences, the abiding, the familiar, and one’s own cultural groups, imagination is about the future, the possible, the alien, the little known, and the other. Yet this culinary dichotomy is not so clear-cut: new foods are often made palatable by using familiar ingredients and techniques, as with sushi rolls filled with corned beef or cream cheese, for example. And not only are our memories imperfect, but they cannot account for change, whether newly developed preferences or foods that do not match up to our sensuously rich memories of them. Other foods, meanwhile, are forgotten or fail to stimulate the imagination.

 

This edited volume interrogates the process of our engagement with food through memory and imagination, be it in anticipation or remembrance of a meal. We wish to include work from a wide variety of disciplines that spans the globe and touches upon different periods in human history.

 

Potential themes may include:

 

Cultural constructions of collective food memories, nostalgic dishes, or imagined cuisines as tied to religion, nation, or class.

The use of memory or imagination in food advertising, literature, or art

The use of memory or imagination by chefs, on menus, or in kitchen/restaurant designs

Food scientists’ approach to recreating flavors, inventing new tastes, etc.

Phenomenological perspectives on taste, the senses, and memory or imagination

Ways in which memory is disrupted, fragmented, or reimagined

Forgetting foods and culinary traditions

The reinterpretation / reimagination that occurs as foods circulate through time and space

Processes (historical, social, biophysical) whereby foods become edible / inedible, palatable / disgusting

 

We have interest from a well-respected publisher who has asked for a full proposal.

 

Please send 250-300 word abstract and 150 word bio to Dr. Beth Forrest and Dr. Greg de St. Maurice by July 15, 2017. Full manuscripts for accepted papers will be due in early spring 2018.

gregdestmaurice@gmail.com

beth.m.forrest@gmail.com

 

Dr. Greg de St. Maurice
Postdoctoral Fellow

Culinaria Research Center, University of Toronto

Air Liquide Research Fellow, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales

 

Dr. Beth Forrest

Professor of Liberal Arts and Food Studies

Culinary Institute of America

 

If you would like to post a CFP on the blog, please contact Ruth Dike.

 

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by | June 20, 2017 · 2:47 pm

Everyday: New Zealand Symposium of Gastronomy

An intriguing call for papers:

Christchurch, November 25th & 26th, 2017

Symposium Theme: Everyday

 

Organizers:

Sam Hassibi (University of Canterbury)

Amir Sayadabdi (University of Canterbury)

 

Food and food-related activities are important, yet often taken-for-granted parts of our everyday lives. The biological imperative that makes eating a necessity usually makes us look at it as a mundane practice. Cooking, too, especially in its ‘domestic’ context, may seem insignificant and uninteresting. Shopping for food, chopping and washing ingredients, and cleaning up after a meal rarely seem poetic or even important. However, the very everydayness of these activities can evolve into meaningful cultural and social symbols, depicting individuals’ or societies’ relationship with different issues ranging from nutrition, health and hygiene to gender norms, national identity and memory. By looking at the everydayness of food-related activities, we come to understand how societies feed themselves, and therefore, we get a better understanding of their cultures, their past, present, and future. By observing and studying everyday food-related practices, habits, and values that are constantly being passed in ordinary kitchens from one generation to the next, we can open a window to also understanding non-everyday foodways such as those practiced in sacred rituals, mourning, and celebrations.

 

We welcome scholars, cooks, armchair gastronomers and food enthusiasts to present their research, discuss their viewpoints, and be a part of the 11th New Zealand Symposium of Gastronomy with the main theme of ‘Everyday’, to be held in Christchurch (25 & 26 November, 2017).

 

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Everyday cooking/eating practices
  • Food and identity (gendered, national, etc.) in everyday life
  • Everyday food choices
  • Historical, cultural and economic aspects of everyday food
  • Fast food and slow food
  • Routinization of everyday life
  • Everyday food and ethics
  • Everyday food and memory
  • Everydayness and Non-everydayness
  • The production, cultivation and distribution of everyday food
  • Politics of everyday food

 

Please send your abstract (max 150 words) and a short biographical statement (max 100 words) before Saturday, July 15th, 2017 to either Sam or Amir (or both) at:

 

saman.hassibi@pg.canterbury.ac.nz

amir.sayadabdi@pg.canterbury.ac.nz

 

We will also be happy to answer any questions regarding the symposium.

 

Notification of acceptance will be sent out by Thursday, August 31st, 2017.

 

There will also be a ‘historic cooking’ workshop on the afternoon of the 24th of November, during which Sam and Amir will lead you through cooking some historic Middle Eastern dishes based on centuries-old recipes. Attendance in the workshop is free of charge for registered symposiasts. More information about the workshop will follow in September.

 

Please feel free to spread the word!

More information about the symposium.

If you have a CFP you would like to feature on the blog, please contact Ruth Dike.

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by | April 11, 2017 · 5:54 pm

AAA CFP Last Call // Sedimentation: Extraction, Soil and Memory

Sedimentation: Extraction, Soil and Memory

(seeking papers re: Agriculture, Food Commodities)

Co-organizers:

Serena Stein, PhD Candidate, Princeton University

Andrew Ofstehage, PhD Candidate, UNC-Chapel Hill

 

Land is often mobilized discursively as wastelands (Voyles, 2015) or zones of hidden potential and promise for capitalist development (Yeh, 2013) to justify frontier expansions worldwide. Land, landscapes and soil are also increasingly recognized as powerful actors in agrarian narratives and encounters, as agentive materials that help create their own history and futures (Kawa, 2016). This panel centers upon the encounters, memories, and afterlives of soil, putting forward the analytic of ‘sedimentation’ to recognize, reconsider and unsettle the dust upon which we tread in so-called development contexts of extraction. In particular, sedimentation, as a social analytic, aims to rethink processes and potential shapes of accumulation in extractive spaces, in terms of strata (tempo, order, verticality); accretion (formation, connection, growth); and provenience (origins, indigeneity, and future archaeologies) of resources taken from the earth, as well as the (im)material objects, spaces, imaginaries, and discursive remains.  Presenters will draw on multi-species and actor/non-actor encounters (Haraway, 2007; Ingold, 2000; Raffles, 2002; Tsing, 2015), materiality of things (Stoler, 2016; Bennett 2010), and memories and afterlives of land and soil encounters (Gordillo, 2014) to examine the placeness, temporalities and relationalities of encounters in and through land, with attention to disparate histories, political projects, and livelihoods in the Global South that help to constitute the material and narrative lives of soil.

Submit paper abstracts to Serena (serenas@princeton.edu) or Andrew (aofste@live.unc.edu) no later than 12 pm (ES) Thursday, April 13th.

 

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by | April 2, 2017 · 9:26 pm

CFP on Waste Materialities & Meaning

AAA 2017 CFP

Session Title: Waste Materialities & Meaning: Anthropological Engagements with Reuse, Repair and Care

 

Organizers:

Cindy Isenhour, University of Maine

Anna Bohlin, University of Gothenburg

Staffan Appelgren, University of Gothenburg

 

 

The recent international focus on circular economies – which purport to reimagine waste as a resource rather than a market externality – has engaged scholars from multiple disciplines in the exploration of reuse as a tool for climate mitigation, reduced materials use and resource conservation.  This is certainly a positive development given the impact of contemporary production-consumption systems on humans and non-humans alike.  At the same time, anthropological engagements with so-called “waste” (garbage, rubbish, discards) raise questions about the novelty of the circular economy concept. Anthropology has already illustrated the deeply relational, situated and cultural entanglements implied in the determination of “resource,” “value,” and “waste”.  From ethnographies featuring innovative reuse among resource-strapped communities (Nguyen 2016) and garbage pickers on the margins of Brazilian society (Millar 2008) to sanitary workers in New York City (Nagle 2014), or among connoisseurs of thrift shops and vintage goods (Isenhour 2012), anthropology has long demonstrated the not-so-novel concept of informal circular economies in action.  Perhaps more importantly, anthropological engagements have helped to illustrate the materiality and generative capacity of “abandoned things” as they fundamentally shape social relations, our collective sense of memory and heritage, as well as human and non-human nature(Reno 2015). What is perhaps new about today’s circular economy imaginaries is that they signal the growing commodification and formalization of waste and reuse practices, raising important questions about the potential gentrification of reuse, and potential exclusion, as well as the shifting relationality of reuse to capitalist markets given projections of the “end of cheap nature” (Schindler and Demaria 2017, Moore 2015).   This panel seeks to both critically and productively engage with long-standing and emergent efforts to “save waste” through repair, care and reuse.  We seek contributions that engage theory and ethnographic detail to explore a wide variety of questions and themes with relevance to the meaning and materiality of reuse including, but not limited to, the following:

 

  • How waste and residual value are variously and situationally determined
  • How discarded goods or “abandoned things” circulate in space and across scales
  • How posthumanist perspectives can provide novel ways of conceptualizing human-object relations in contexts of reuse
  • The generative capacity of reuse to shape/reshape livelihoods, waste infrastructures and materials markets
  • Everyday practices of maintenance, repair and care – as processes of reuse
  • The potential of reuse markets and practices to bring transformative change (or variously, another individualist and niche market-based movement)

 

If interested, please send an abstract to Cindy Isenhour (cynthia.isenhour@maine.edu) by Friday, April 7th.  We’ll get back to you no later than Monday, April 10th so that we can submit the panel prior to the AAA deadline of Friday, April 14th.

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by | April 2, 2017 · 9:22 pm

New Call for Paper’s Website Section

M. Ruth Dike

University of Kentucky

In an effort to centralize Call for Paper’s for the upcoming American Anthropological Association (AAA) annual meeting, we have created a new Call for Paper’s section of the website! This will be a place where anyone can browse CFP’s related to the anthropology of food for the upcoming AAA meetings. If we see Call for Paper’s that are relevant to the anthropology of food, we will first post them on the blog and then on the CFP’s section of the website.

2017_AAA Meeting

We hope to also post CFP’s for other conferences such as ASFS/AFHV in the future.

If you see a CFP relevant to the anthropology of food, please send it to mruthdike@uky.edu to be posted on the blog and/or our listserv. The deadline for AAA Invited and Volunteered Panel, Individual Paper, Roundtable Sessions and Poster Submissions is Friday, April 14th, 2017 at 5 pm EDT, so please send in any relevant CFP’s in ASAP!

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