Syllabus

Course Description

 

Brian Stross                 Anthropology  393                 2007     

 

 

FOOD FOR DISCOURSE AND THOUGHT:

FOOD AND COMMUNICATION

 

 

Course Description

 

Food sustains us, giving meaning, order, and values to our lives; and food

reflects the symbolism in our ideological systems.  Food plays an important part in

our identity construction, our religious practices, and our socialization.  Foodways

can thus tell us a lot about the society in which they play a part.  Furthermore,

foodways change both in the influencing and reflection of a society's technology.  This

course will investigate the facts that we communicate messages by means of foods, as

well as about foods, that we communicate frequently and much about foods, and that

we can look at foodways to discern cultural presuppositions used in

communication. 

 

     Topics explored in this course will include food preferences and taboos,

genetically modified food,fast foods, technology in food production (reproduction

[seed, egg, stock] growth, maintenance [weeding, feeding], harvest, packing,

storage), distribution, and consumption (preparation, eating, disposal), food and

energy utilization, conversation during the production, distribution, preparation,

consumption and  disposal of food, food as a topic of conversation, naming and

beliefs about foods, food metaphors, social structure in seating and eating, meals

and manners, food and education, food and religion, food and sex, food and identity,

food and power, food and forensics, food and the senses, food and the flow of time,

and maize in Mesoamerica. 

 

     Food participates in multiple symbolic systems in a society, and one goal of this

course, conducted in a seminar format, will be to discern some of the meanings that can

be read into the language-like patterns to be found in the choices and variations in what,

when, where, and how people eat, as well as what, where, when, why, and how they

talk about food.

 

     In this course we will have three ethnographic projects, in which participants

will collect information on foods or food related information that could be interesting

and relevant to the course.

 

While this course does not consist exclusively Latin American content, there will

be a greater emphasis on Latin America than on other parts of the world 

 

Requirements:

Grades will be assigned on the basis of class preparation and
on the written (+/- 8 pages each) and oral presentations of  the results of three
ethnographic exercises, as well as on keeping and up to date journal.   Each
week one (or two) of the participants will have volunteered to lead the discussion
of the assigned reading, by preparing notes on the reading assignment for the week
and questions for discussion.  

 

Prerequisites   

 

            None

 

 

 

 

 

Bibliography (Food and Culture)

 

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05/30/2007