g their families, is deeply inscribed into dominance and subordination in daily life, based on a sense of 'natural' gender roles. Even when men participate in household activities, still the woman is seen as the one 'who has everything under control', and the one who gives directions. The study is based on participant observation in different households.
The third section 'Food, body, and culture' examines how people in diverse cultures think about fat. Hortense Powdermaker, reviewing anthropological literature, shows that obesity is mainly a 'western' problem, explaining fatness and indulgence in eating with compensations of frustrations or neurotic disorders. To the contrary, fat in many cultures symbolizes beauty, power, well being, and fertility.
Hilde Bruch shows how body image is connected to self-awareness. She found out that self-awareness differentiates across genders, classes, and ages. She gives an example men who are dissatisfied with their girth when they are young, but in Germany old and upper class men consider their obesity to be a sign of status and power.
Elisa J. Sobo examines how in Jamaica fatness is associated with kindness, altruism, and a sociable and giving nature, while skinny people are perceived as being mean and stingy, and how these categories are inscribed into language, for example when pleasant things are called 'sweet'.
The forth section 'The political economy of food: commodification and scarcity' links food not only to unequal gender relations, but also to overall social hierarchies and power structures. Most people would define the access to food as the most basic human right. Yet, the authors point out that with capitalism, colonialism, and food commodification, access to food and control over it has become an international key measure of power and the lack of power. Food scarcity, hunger and malnutrition are often a marker of economic and cultural marginality. The international hierarchy of the 'Fist World' vs. the 'Third World' is clearly expressed through differential access to food resources. Besides providing a cultural context, a central goal of the book is to highlight the economic realities that underlie food habits. It aims at supporting responsible policies by integrating indigenous knowledge into nutritional understandings. The authors of the papers suggest that nutritionists need to pay attention to sociocultural factors surrounding food in order to respond successfully to hunger issues. Gender in this is context an important factor, since women are more likely to be malnourished than men are.
In her paper on Japanese mothers and obentos, lunch boxes that children carry with them to school, Anne Allison shows how one single food item is invested with a meaning of cultural order, gender roles, and ideological symbols. The schoolteacher judges both the mother and the child whether the lunch box is prepared properly, whether the child has eaten all of it, and whether both are able to conform to the rules that the obento embodies. It thus becomes a metaphor of social order and disorder, and a tool of discipline for the state, which intervenes into interfamilial relations and structures gender roles.
In his paper, Stephen Mennell differentiates between hunger and appetite, hunger being a body drives which occurs in cycles, and appetite being rather a psychological stat
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