Unit convenor and teaching staff |
Unit convenor and teaching staff
Unit Convenor
Eve Vincent
Contact via email
Australian Hearing Hub
Head Tutor
Tomas Wilkoszewski
Contact via email
Tutor
Max Harwood
Contact via email
Payel Ray
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Credit points |
Credit points
3
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Prerequisites |
Prerequisites
ANTH150 or (12cp at 100 level or above) or admission to GDipArts
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Corequisites |
Corequisites
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Co-badged status |
Co-badged status
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Unit description |
Unit description
We all eat. But what, when, how, how much and with whom we eat is bound up with questions of cultural difference, gender and power. The study of food, eating and hunger has long held a particular fascination for anthropologists-from subsistence strategies to nutritional intake, from food taboos to the social rules that structure how people eat together. This unit introduces students to the idea that the everyday activities of cooking and eating are packed with economic, medical, political, and cultural meanings. We will focus first on some classic anthropological work on eating as a social practice. Then we move to the concerns of contemporary anthropology, examining issues such as the global industrial food system, and the link between migration, ethnic identity and food. Throughout this course we are concerned with everyday eating practices, exploring the extraordinary variety of food likes and dislikes in a range of ethnographic contexts. Not only will we talk about food, we will also come together to share food.
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Information about important academic dates including deadlines for withdrawing from units are available at https://www.mq.edu.au/study/calendar-of-dates
On successful completion of this unit, you will be able to:
Unless a Special Consideration request has been submitted and approved, (a) a penalty for lateness will apply – two (2) marks out of 100 will be deducted per day for assignments submitted after the due date – and (b) no assignment will be accepted more than seven (7) days (incl. weekends) after the original submission deadline. No late submissions will be accepted for timed assessments – e.g. quizzes, online tests.This information applies to all assessment items in this unit.
Name | Weighting | Hurdle | Due |
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Tutorial Participation | 10% | No | Weekly |
Critical Summary | 15% | Yes | Monday March 26 |
Eating Experience Research | 35% | No | Friday May 18 |
Take Home Exam | 40% | No | Sunday June 17 |
Due: Weekly
Weighting: 10%
Each week, you should prepare for the tutorial discussion by completing the required readings. You should arrive at class willing to engage in respectful discussion of the authors’ key points and arguments. It is especially useful to bring with you any doubts or confusion about the readings - the tutorial is your time to clarify the readings as well as the lecture content. You are expected both to make informed contributions to class discussions, and to listen to others' contributions. Please notify your tutor if you are going to be absent from a tutorial. You are expected to attend at least 80 per cent of tutorials over the course of the semester.
Due: Monday March 26
Weighting: 15%
This is a hurdle assessment task (see assessment policy for more information on hurdle assessment tasks)
You are required to submit a 500 word summary of a reading. Details for this assessment task will be available in Week 2.
Due: Friday May 18
Weighting: 35%
This social research project will be undertaken as a group assignment (3-4 students). Groups will be organised in your Week 3 tutorial. Your group will choose a particular eating situation, whether it is dinner at home with a family, a celebratory meal, or dining in a cafe or restaurant. You will then produce a description and an analysis of this particular eating situation. The task is to closely observe an eating experience, and to provide some analysis of your observations based on the course material.
In-class presentations in Weeks 8 and 9 will be worth 10 per cent of your overall mark in this unit. Each group will have up to 10 minutes for their presentation. Creativity in style and media of presentation is encouraged for the in-class presentations.
On Friday May 18, each student will also submit a written report of not more than 1,500 words on their project (detailed instructions on the report will be provided). The written report will be worth 25 per cent of your overall mark in this unit: this is an individual assignment.
Due: Sunday June 17
Weighting: 40%
You will write two short essays of 1000 words each, excluding references. Essay questions will be uploaded on Monday June 4 at 9am. Take home exams are due by 11:59pm on Sunday June 17. Late submission of your take home exam will be penalised as per the general assessment information.
Weekly readings for this course are available through the library.
The following books are background readings for the course and have been placed on Reserve:
Food and Foodways is a journal dedicated to the history and culture of food in different societies.
Week 1. Eating Together: Introduction to the Anthropology of Food
Friday March 2
Eating is a profoundly social experience, cementing or marking social intimacies, hierarchies and roles. In this lecture we will talk about the idea of 'commensality', the practice of eating together. We will explore the kinds of relationships and boundaries between people created through various meals: a Javanese feast called a 'slametan'; an everyday Chinese lunch in a Hong Kong eatery; an anthropologist's attempt to share a festive Christmas meal in the Kalahari desert. At this introductory lecture, the structure of the unit, its key themes, and the assessment items will be explained.
Required reading:
Further reading:
There are no tutorials this week. You should read the course outline thoroughly and familiarise yourself with the course assignments. If you have any questions please bring them to next week’s tutorial.
Week 2. Taste and Taboo
Friday March 9
Ever eaten spiders? Perhaps. Seaweed? No doubt. Raw meat? Guinea pig? Pigs trotters? Kangaroo?
Why do some cultures regard certain foodstuffs as disgusting, while others regard these same items as highly desirable delicacies or as everyday foods? How do we learn about these categories? What explains the different cultural categorisations of the same edible items? We will read two authors, Mary Douglas and Marvin Harris, who disagree with each other in their attempts to answer these questions, which are fundamental to the anthropology of food.
Required reading:
Further reading:
Week 3. The Man-Eating Myth and Mortuary Cannibalism in the Amazon
Friday March 16
Was anthropophagy -the consumption of human flesh- a sanctioned practice in certain societies, partaken of for specific cultural reasons? What might it mean to lovingly ingest part of the body of a deceased family member? Or is cannibalism a myth, generated so that one culture can differentiate itself from others it sees as inferior? What role does colonialism and contemporary expressions of racism have to play in all of this?
Required reading:
Film: Kuru: The science and the sorcery (2009) Rob Bygott
Further reading:
Week 4. Gendered Symbols, Gendered Roles.
Friday March 23
Studying food inevitably involves studying gender relations. We will talk, first, about the symbolic associations that certain foods themselves have – foods and also drinks come to symbolise the qualities which a particular culture associates with masculinity, and the qualities a particular culture associates with femininity. These symbolic associations vary across cultures. Second, we will talk about gender and the allocation of certain roles surrounding food production, cooking, shopping and serving.
Required readings:
Further reading:
Friday March 30 is Good Friday. No classes in Week 5.
Week 6. Entangled Commodities: Sugar and Coffee
Friday April 6
How did sugar come to be so ubiquitous, and why do we continue to eat it even while knowing it is bad for us? This week we will discuss the way a single commodity such as sugar or coffee might be used to reveal complex entanglements. The history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the use of indentured South Sea islander labour in the Queensland sugar fields; the spread of sugar into a nutritionally deficient English working diet; the use of sweetness to mark the new rhythms of industrial capitalism and the boundary between work and rest; the current status of sugar in Western diets are all intertwined in our exploration of the sweet stuff. In the second half of the lecture we will turn our attention to the rise of cafe culture and the way food preferences express and reflect social class; the nature of the relationship between rural coffee growers and urban consumers; globalisation, commodity chains and debates about economic regulation of global markets.
Required reading:
Further reading:
Week 7. High Food, Low Food; Fast Food, Slow Food. Global Industrial Agriculture
Friday April 13
This week will move forward in time from the early emergence of industrial capitalism to the rise of the industrialised global food system in the post WW2 period. We will cover the centrality of corn in the American food chain, the rise of fast food, and industrialised methods of animal slaughter. We will also talk about the labour practices associated with industrialised food production, focussing on Australia's Seasonal Workers Program. In the second half of the lecture, we shift our attention to various food movements that have emerged as a response to this system. What is the relationship between pleasure, eating and time, according to the Slow Food movement? And why does Julie Guthman, a critic of both the industrialised food system and the organic movement, describe the alternative food movement as 'unbearably white'?
Required reading:
Further reading:
April 16-27: Mid-semester recess, no lectures or tutorials
Week 8. What's with the Lamb Ads? Land, Labour, Race and Meat-eating in Australia.
Friday May 4
Another year, another lamb ad. In 2016, Meat and Livestock Australia depicted Aboriginal people hosting a beach BBQ for successive waves of 'boat people', drawing criticism from both Indigenous figures and those who interpreted the ad's inclusive representation as a threat to white Australian identity. Why has meat been so central to constructions of Australian national identity? This week we will challenge and enrich a popular account of Australian food culture, which leaves little room for Indigenous food practices and which assumes that a monocultural Anglo diet changed only in the post WW2 period. We will think critically about the understanding of Indigenous people as 'hunters and gatherers' and about the terms of cosmopolitan multicultural food consumption.
Required reading:
Further reading:
Week 9. The Way to a Person's Identity is through their Stomach
(Guest lecture by Tomas Wilkoszewski)
Friday May 11
Based on my fieldwork among Uyghur immigrants in Turkey I will talk about the connection between food and migration. Food not only plays an important role in the migrant’s home building, the preparation of food is also a skill that might enable migrant groups to gain a livelihood in the host country. Garnished with examples from Istanbul, I will furthermore discuss the narration as well as the preparation of food as a marker for a distinct nationalism extending an everyday life activity into the realm of political discourses.
Required reading:
Week 10 Bigger bodies. Public health problem? Source of 'fat pride'? Cause of 'slow death'?
Friday May 18
Since the 1990s, the Australian media has talked of an 'obesity crisis'. The lecture will explore various lenses through which to view these bigger bodies and (through which people with bigger bodies view themselves). Curves, fat, cellulite - all are attributed different status across cultures and within cultures. Honing in on Australia, we will canvass a public health perspective; the issue of socio-economic disadvantage, urban lives and the unequal distribution of obesity-related illness across geographic spaces; the rise of a 'fat pride' movement, which challenges fat shaming and reclaims a range of body sizes as a source of beauty and pleasure; and cultural theorist Lauren Berlant's notion of 'slow death'.
Required readings:
Further reading:
Week 11. Hunger
Friday May 25
According to United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates, about 795 million people of the 7.3 billion people in the world, or one in nine, 'were suffering from chronic undernourishment in 2014-2016'. Global hunger is a serious issue, however it is not our exclusive focus this week. We will explore a broad range of settings and scenarios in which people go hungry. Anthropologist Megan Warin conducted ethnographic research with anorectics undergoing treatment, in order to understand the meanings they attributed to their own bodies. Fiona Wright explores her own relationship with this illness. We will also read about a series of Turkish political prisoners' hunger strikes and learn more in the lecture about the history of the hungry body as a political weapon. We are not seeking to compare these experiences of hunger but to learn more about why hunger forms part of the human experience even in societies where access to food is not considered a problem.
IMPORTANT: The essay by Fiona Wright and the excerpt from Megan Warin are potentially disturbing. Do not hesitate to reach out to your tutors if you need support. The Butterfly Foundation has a helpline - a free and confidential service which provides information, counselling and treatment referral for eating disorders, disordered eating, body image and related issues. Call 1800 ED HOPE (1800 33 4673). If you decide NOT to read either of these pieces for personal reasons then this is an entirely acceptable decision, which will not be penalised in any way.
Required reading:
Further reading:
Week 12. Kitchens, cooking and the senses.
Friday June 1
Guest lecturer: Dr Lindy McDougall
In Week 12 we invite you to bring food and/or recipe books to your tutorial to share with your classmates. Come to class prepared to discuss the following questions: Do you have a story about the food you have brought to share? Does it evoke a particular personal memory? Does it link you more generally to a place or collective experience? How did you learn to cook it?
Required reading:
Further reading:
Week 13: Course Overview
This week looks back over the course, drawing together key themes of disgust and desire; boundary making; interconnectedness and entanglements; food and gender, class and ethnic identities; the social relations that surround food; hunger, protest and exploitation.
This week's tutorials will assist you in the writing of your Take Home Exam.
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Date | Description |
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29/01/2018 | Please read the assessment information carefully. |