Dacha Idylls

Dacha Idylls

Author: Melissa L. Caldwell

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 0520262840

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"Anyone who has spent time in Russia knows the importance of 'going to the dacha.' In this ethnography Melissa Caldwell reveals the mystique of rural life by exploring the social nature of gardening and making food, and Russian relationships to the land. It's truly an innovative study!"--Catherine Wanner, author of Communities of the Converted: Ukrainians and Global Evangelism "In this engaging ethnography, Melissa Caldwell brilliantly demonstrates what is peculiarly Russian about the dacha, long an object of literary and nostalgic imagining, while simultaneously situating the 'vacation cottage' within larger histories of leisure, consumption, home, and post-socialist transition. A must-read for scholars of Russia or tourism."--Pamela Ballinger, author of History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans


Seasoned Socialism

Seasoned Socialism

Author: Anastasia Lakhtikova

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2019-04-04

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 0253040981

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This essay anthology explores the intersection of gender, food and culture in post-1960s Soviet life from personal cookbooks to gulag survival. Seasoned Socialism considers the relationship between gender and food in late Soviet daily life, specifically between 1964 and 1985. Political and economic conditions heavily influenced Soviet life and foodways during this period and an exploration of Soviet women’s central role in the daily sustenance for their families as well as the obstacles they faced on this quest offers new insights into intergenerational and inter-gender power dynamics of that time. Seasoned Socialism considers gender construction and performance across a wide array of primary sources, including poetry, fiction, film, women’s journals, oral histories, and interviews. This collection provides fresh insight into how the Soviet government sought to influence both what citizens ate and how they thought about food.


Food Between the Country and the City

Food Between the Country and the City

Author: Nuno Domingos

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2014-03-27

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 0857857282

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At a time when the relationship between 'the country' and 'the city' is in flux worldwide, the value and meanings of food associated with both places continue to be debated. Building upon the foundation of Raymond Williams' classic work, The Country and the City, this volume examines how conceptions of the country and the city invoked in relation to food not only reflect their changing relationship but have also been used to alter the very dynamics through which countryside and cities, and the food grown and eaten within them, are produced and sustained. Leading scholars in the study of food offer ethnographic studies of peasant homesteads, family farms, community gardens, state food industries, transnational supermarkets, planning offices, tourist boards, and government ministries in locales across the globe. This fascinating collection provides vital new insight into the contested dynamics of food and will be key reading for upper-level students and scholars of food studies, anthropology, history and geography.


Nourishing the Nation

Nourishing the Nation

Author: Venetia Johannes

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2019-11-04

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 1789204380

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In the early twenty-first century, nationalism has seen a surprising resurgence across the Western world. In the Catalan Autonomous Community in northeastern Spain, this resurgence has been most apparent in widespread support for Catalonia’s pro-independence movement, and the popular assertion of Catalan symbols, culture and identity in everyday life. Nourishing the Nation provides an ethnographic account of the everyday experience of national identity in Catalonia, using an essential, everyday object of consumption: food. As a crucial element of Catalan cultural life, a focus on food provides unique insight into the lived realities of Catalan nationalism, and how Catalans experience and express their national identity today.


Re-orienting Cuisine

Re-orienting Cuisine

Author: Kwang Ok Kim

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2015-02-01

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 1782385630

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Foods are changed not only by those who produce and supply them, but also by those who consume them. Analyzing food without considering changes over time and across space is less meaningful than analyzing it in a global context where tastes, lifestyles, and imaginations cross boundaries and blend with each other, challenging the idea of authenticity. A dish that originated in Beijing and is recreated in New York is not necessarily the same, because although authenticity is often claimed, the form, ingredients, or taste may have changed. The contributors of this volume have expanded the discussion of food to include its social and cultural meanings and functions, thereby using it as a way to explain a culture and its changes.


Why We Eat, How We Eat

Why We Eat, How We Eat

Author: Emma-Jayne Abbots

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-02-11

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 1134766033

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Why We Eat, How We Eat maps new terrains in thinking about relations between bodies and foods. With the central premise that food is both symbolic and material, the volume explores the intersections of current critical debates regarding how individuals eat and why they eat. Through a wide-ranging series of case studies it examines how foods and bodies both haphazardly encounter, and actively engage with, one another in ways that are simultaneously material, social, and political. The aim and uniqueness of this volume is therefore the creation of a multidisciplinary dialogue through which to produce new understandings of these encounters that may be invisible to more established paradigms. In so doing, Why We Eat, How We Eat concomitantly employs eating as a tool - a novel way of looking - while also drawing attention to the term 'eating' itself, and to the multiple ways in which it can be constituted. The volume asks what eating is - what it performs and silences, what it produces and destroys, and what it makes present and absent. It thereby traces the webs of relations and multiple scales in which eating bodies are entangled; in diverse and innovative ways, contributors demonstrate that eating draws into relationships people, places and objects that may never tangibly meet, and show how these relations are made and unmade with every mouthful. By illuminating these contemporary encounters, Why We Eat, How We Eat offers an empirically grounded richness that extends previous approaches to foods and bodies.


Urban Life

Urban Life

Author: George Gmelch

Publisher: Waveland Press

Published: 2018-01-03

Total Pages: 539

ISBN-13: 1478636904

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More than half of the world’s population lives in cities. What are their lives like in very different global and globalizing cities? How can urban anthropologists study and understand the diverse and complex experiences of urban dwellers all over the globe? The latest edition of Urban Life explores questions about how to study urban lives and examines experiences of urban inhabitants in cities across the globe. Authors ask questions such as, how can one study the activities in a huge fish market in Tokyo? How do elderly residents benefit from urban agriculture in New York City? How do people maneuver ever-present traffic jams in Istanbul? How do low-income residents in Cairo manage their lives drawing on neighborhood social networks? How do immigrants fight for green spaces in Paris? How do families manage transnational ties between New York City and Ecuador? The book is organized into six parts: Urban Fieldwork; Communities; Urban Structure, Inequality, and Survival; Immigrants, Migrants, and Refugees; Changing Cities; and Current Topics in Urban Anthropology. The last part addresses issues at the forefront of anthropological research and broader political debates, like environmental justice, disability and accessibility, and access to water supplies. Each part includes an introduction and each chapter is preceded by notes about its context and relevance. The rich ethnographic content of the chapters makes them highly accessible to students while addressing relevant topics and themes.


St Petersburg

St Petersburg

Author: Catriona Kelly

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2014-02-25

Total Pages: 485

ISBN-13: 0300169183

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"Fragile, gritty, and vital to an extraordinary degree, St Petersburg is one of the world's most alluring cities - a place in which the past is at once ubiquitous and inescapably controversial. This book shows how creative engagement with the past has always been fundamental to St Petersburg's residents"--From front jacket flap.


Ethnographies of Social Support

Ethnographies of Social Support

Author: Markus Schlecker

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2013-06-18

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 113733097X

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Why do elderly choose to move away from their children so as to not receive their support? Using a number of case studies, contributors explore social support as a tool of mutuality, or maintaining relatedness and sharing feelings, rather than preventing or patching up problems. This book helps correct the dominant framework of deliberate action.


Traversing

Traversing

Author: Susanna Trnka

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2020-05-15

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 1501749242

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Traversing is about our ways of seeing, experiencing, and moving through the world and how they shape the kinds of people we become. Drawing from concepts developed by two phenomenological philosophers, Martin Heidegger and Jan Patočka, and putting them in conversation with ethnographic analysis of the lives of contemporary Czechs, Susanna Trnka examines how embodiment is crucial for understanding our being-in-the-world. In particular, Traversing scrutinizes three kinds of movements we make as embodied actors in the world: how we move through time and space, be it by walking along city streets, gliding across the dance floor, or clicking our way through digital landscapes; how we move toward and away from one another, as erotic partners, family members, or fearful, ethnic "others"; and how we move toward ourselves and the earth we live on. Above all, Traversing focuses on tracing the ways in which the body and motion are fundamental to our lived experience of the world, so we can develop a better understanding of the empirical details of Czech society and what they can reveal to us about the human condition.