Carole M. Counihan

Food and gender : identity and power

Food and sexual identity among the culina men are Taro (they cannot be rice) - political aspects of food choices in Wamira, P.N.G. hospitality, women and the efficacy of beer feeding their faith - recipe knowledge among Thai Buddhist women an anthropological view of western womens prodigious fasting women as gatekeepers what does it mean to be fat, thin and female in the United States. (Part contents).

Female Identity, Food, and Power in Contemporary Florence

Life histories from contemporary Florentine women reveal that their identity andpower have traditionally been attained and manifested through control overfood provisioning. Furthermore, their ability to manipulate the symbolic content offood has enabled them to influence the behavior and values of theirfamilies. Recent changes in Italian society and economy have brought new role expectationsfor women. They now try to remain theprincipal administrators of home andfamily at the same time they holdfull-time wage-laborjobs. Because oftime and identity conflicts, they can perform neither well. While they are glimpsing the possibility of publicpolitical and economicpower, they are losing their traditional domestic influence over family and children. [women, food, power, Italy, identity]

An anthropological view of western women's prodigious fasting: A review essay

Rudolph M. Bell (1985). Holy Anorexia. Epilogue by William N. Davis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Joan Jacobs Brumberg (1988). Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Caroline Walker Bynum (1987). Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. Berkeley: University of California Press.

What does it mean to be fat, thin, and female in the United States: A review essay

Boskind‐White, Marlene, and William C. White (1983). Bulimarexia: The Binge/Purge Cycle. New York: Norton. Bruch, Hilde (1978). The Golden Cage: The Enigma of Anorexia Nervosa. New York: Vintage. Chemin, Kim (1981). The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness. New York: Harper & Row. Millman, Marcia (1980). Such a Pretty Face: Being Fat in America. New York: Norton. Orbach, Susie (1978). Fat Is a Feminist Issue: The Anti‐Diet Guide to Permanent Weight Loss. New York: Paddington.

Interdisciplinarity, food, and power.

Christine Wilson’s (2002) narrative about becoming anutritional anthropologist is a window into the developmentof interdisciplinary food studies in the social and naturalsciences. Wilson’s career has been as multi-stranded as nutri-tional anthropology. She wove together business skills, edi-torial experience, fascination with biology, nutritional surveymethodology, and anthropological fieldwork in Malaya toforge a pioneering path into the now widely-known field ofnutritional anthropology. She collaborated with a number ofprofessionals in diverse fields including nutrition, para-sitology, medicine, anthropology, and public health. Hergoal was to discover the reasons for and consequences ofpeople’s eating habits. Wilson’s paper and experience affirmthe benefits of interdisciplinary approaches in food studies.Parallel to Wilson’s narrative of her own professionaltrajectory is her description of some developments in appliednutritional anthropology. She aptly points out both the ori-ginality of Margaret Mead’s early work (1943) and the sig-nificance of government sponsorship of food habits research,especially of war-related research on how to convince soldiersand civilians to change their diets and eat unfamiliar foodsin response to war-time shortages. Later applied researchaimed to understand and mitigate nutrition-related diseasesbylinkingeatinghabits,dietarynutrition,andhealth.Overall,Wilson’s paper underscores the value of anthropologicalcollaboration with biological sciences in the study of humanfood behaviour.Interdisciplinarity within the social sciences has also beenfundamental to advances in nutritional anthropology andfood and culture studies, particularly in understanding howpower affects eating habits. In studying eating disorders, forexample, anthropologists have drawn on the work of his-torians, psychologists, sociologists, and women’s studiesscholars to study how power relations affect women’s fast-ing and beliefs about food in diverse cultural settings. Afeminist perspective motivated my inquiry into why con-temporaryWesternwomenarestarvingthemselves,sometimesto death. I compared the research of three historians (Bell,1985;Bynum,1987;Brumberg,1988)onwomen’sfastingoverseven centuries with anthropologists’ cross-cultural data onfasting and psychologists’ studies of modern eating disordersto show the cultural peculiarity of contemporary Westernwomen’s eating problems and their grounding in Westerncultural dualism and patriarchy (Counihan, 1999). Nichter’s(2000) recent interdisciplinary research on girls and foodcombined data from interviews, questionnaires and focusgroups with scholarship from sociology, nutrition, and psy-chology to show girls’ continuing struggles to maintain apositive relationship to food and body. Grounding the anth-ropological study of eating disorders in interdisciplinaryperspectives reveals that modern U.S. women’s relation tofood is historically specific, can be changed, and can beempowering rather than oppressive.Anthropological studies of foodways have also used inter-disciplinary perspectives to study power relations betweenclasses, races and nations. For example, Mintz (1985) com-bined anthropology and history to study the world-widecommodification of sugar effected through European inva-sion of the Caribbean, land seizure, and enslavement ofAfricans to produce exorbitant profits. Glasser (1988) com-bined social work, political economy, and ethnography todocument the structure, ideology, and clientele of an urbansoup kitchen. She described the cultural context of thepoverty and social alienation that drove people to the soupkitchen and designed a series of classes to enable clients tobemoreeffectivesocialactors.Fink(1998)combinedfeministand political-economic approaches with participant obser-vation and interviews to study class, race, and gender rela-tions in a pork-processing plant in rural Iowa. Attention tothe different experiences in the meatpacking industry ofmale and female, immigrant and native-born, and black,white and Latino workers enabled a richer and more criticalunderstanding of the inequalities inherent in the industry.The study of McDonald’s in East Asia by Watson (1997) andhiscollaboratorscombinedethnographic,economic,andpoli-tical perspectives to study the globalization of food and itseffects on local cultures and diets.As Christine Wilson’s article and career demonstrate,anthropologists studying foodways in the future will benefitfrom vibrant interdisciplinary connections. The insights con-tributed by historical, political, economic, and women’sE-mail: carole.counihan@millersville.edu studies perspectives will continue to sharpen anthropologists’0195–6663/02/010073+02

Uma visão antropológica do prodigioso jejum de mulheres ocidentais

35.00/0 # 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd

Americans in Tuscany: Charity, Compassion and Belonging

In prodigious fasting, sometimes to death, Western women have expressed an extraordinary relationship to food for almost eight centuries. This essay attempts to explain such behavior by weaving together the fine-grained and fascinating historical data presented in the three books under review - Holy Anorexia (Bell, 1985); Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease (Brumberg, 1988) e Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Bynum, 1987) - and viewing them from the cross-cultural and holistic perspectives fundamental to anthropology. I aim to show that Western female fasting differs radically from other kinds of fasting observed by anthropologists across the globe and that it involves a highly symbolic alteration of womens universal relationship to food. I argue that it is best understood as a multidetermined behavior, an interplay of ideological, economic, political, and social factors.

A Review of“Beyond Alternative Food Networks”

Brigades and their actions, in fact, shows an increasing convergence between their previously opposing ideological positions (especially in the case of the Communist paper L’Unità), in favour of the emergence of common themes emphasizing the myth of national unity: ‘a sort of civil religion . . . based on the sublimation of a hegemonic order and its sacralization’ (p. 144). In the conclusion, Briziarelli contraposes the counter-hegemonic project of the Red Brigades, which erroneously prioritized the war of manoeuvre, to that of the Italian Communist Party, which after the war had prioritized the war of movement but had ended up being co-opted into the ruling order. In his view, to secure a chance of success a revolutionary project must inject a ‘strong element of Jacobin coercion’ (p. 156) into a counter-hegemonic strategy relying primarily on a war of position. In this conclusion we find the wider rationale of this book: an analysis of the hegemonic and counterhegemonic struggles in the history of Italy, in which the Red Brigades provided a ‘moment of demystification’ and a ‘utopic project’ despite its ultimate failure (p. 160). From this perspective it becomes a lot clearer why the author has discarded and overlooked most of the literature on Italian terrorism. The Red Brigades are not of interest per se but only as another example of the historical struggle against bourgeois capitalism.

Making place with the food voice in the san Luis Valley of Colorado

Cristina Grasseni’s book about Italy’s locally based solidarity purchase groups, or GAS (Gruppi di Acquisto Solidale), offers an answer to the widely posed question about whether the local food movement can actually change things: the food system, consumers’ attitudes towards food, farmers’ livelihoods, the global economy, and so on. As Grasseni puts it, “does alternative provisioning effectively transfigure market relations?” (28). Beyond Alternative Food Networks is a detailed and meticulous ethnographic investigation of one local GAS in Bergamo, northern Italy, and of the broader network of GAS in the Lombardy region. Grasseni reveals the workings of the GAS, the diverse roles of members and farmers, their ideologies, their practices, and the ways GAS participation affects their identities and food habits. Most importantly, she argues, GAS is a form of civil society participation that allows Italians to act politically in the context of increasing distrust of traditional politics. GAS are groups of families and friends who purchase foods collectively from farmers on the basis of solidarity. Grasseni studied one GAS through several years of participant observation and interviews. She was a member of its mapping committee, participated as a delegate in the larger Bergamo GAS network and national GAS assemblies, and, with other collaborators, conducted two structured surveys of almost 300 GAS members and 42 coordinators in 2011–12. This research built on Grasseni’s long-term study of northern Italian foodways, particularly cheese-making in the Alpine region, and her concern with the reinvention of local food as cultural heritage (Grasseni, La reinvenzione del Cibo, Developing Skill, Developing Vision). From the founding of the first GAS in Fidenza, Italy, in 1994, GAS have sprung up all over Italy, with over 1,600 today. Estimates are that about 45,000 Italian families participate in GAS, spending around 80 million euro per year. In 2011, the province of Bergamo had a population of one million people who supported 62 GAS, along with 325 direct sale farms, 35 automatic raw milk machines, 70 ecotourism farms, and 4 farmers markets (12)—showing northern Italians’ widespread disillusionment with conventional food supply systems and their longing for more direct access to local

Food in Anthropology

Food-centered life history interviews have been collected since 1996 in my fieldwork in the small Mexicano town of Antonito in the southern San Luis Valley of Colorado and the. The relationship between voice and place in anthropological method and theory can be explored along two paths. One path is how these interviews gathered in this place have created a space for my own writerly voice at the same time as they have posed questions about insider vs. outsider location, relation, power, and authority. The second path is how Mexicanas’ diverse constructions of landscapes, rivers, homes, gardens, kitchens and the like portray culture, express gender, construct history, and establish powerful claims to space. Stories about places by traditionally silenced people like the rural Chicanas I interviewed are particularly important in enriching the historical record. Their food-centered life histories contest stereotypes about the relegation of women to the home and about Chicanos’ disregard for environmental conservation. They reveal longstanding roots in the land, which can provide cultural legitimacy and economic sustenance, hallmarks of Chicano cultural citizenship.