Risqué Business serves up the breastaurant industry, where food service, sex appeal, identity, and gender politics mix.Risqué Business explores the rise and ongoing cultural reckoning of “breastaurants”: sports bar–style restaurants like Hooters and Twin Peaks, which have long relied on the sexualized presentation of female servers to attract a mostly straight, male clientele. Ty Matejowsky, professor of anthropology at the Univer...

A critical meditation of the iconic 24-7 roadside chain and its place in the southern imaginaryWaffle House has long been touted as an icon of the American South. The restaurant’s consistent foregrounding as a resonant symbol of regional character proves relevant for understanding much about the people, events, and foodways shaping the sociopolitical contours of today’s Bible Belt. Whether approached as a comedic punchline on the Internet, television, and ...

Few contemporary societies remain beyond the global reach of today’s fast food industry. In both profound and subtle ways, this style of cuisine and the corporate brands that promote it have effectively transformed the appetites, health profiles, and consumer sensibilities of millions the world over. To better understand the variegated impact of McDonald’s and other national and international quick-service eateries on local life within a non-western urban context, Ty Matejowsky offers read...

Wilk and his colleagues draw upon their own international field experience to examine how food systems are changing around the globe. The authors offer a cultural perspective that is mising in other economic and developmental studies, and provide rich ethnographic data on markets, industrial production, and food economies. This new book will appeal to professionals in economic and environmental anthropology: economic development, agricultural economics, consumer behavior, nutritional scien...

Economic development is an important focus of anthropological work in rural and urban communities around the world, and in this volume the contributors offer expert analyses on the theory and practice of development. Chapters cover the key topics of market systems, agricultural knowledge, modernization, population growth, participatory development, conservation strategies, culturally sustainable development, globalization and privatization, tourism, urban development, and financial markets...

Volume 32 of REA continues the series' on-going presentation of new and highly engaging anthropological research. Chapters contained herein reflect the diverse range of broad based and localized topics economic anthropologists currently explore from various critical perspectives. Spanning deep history and present day economic processes, the contributions to this volume are subdivided into three major thematic sections. Part I addresses questions of how the political economy is articulated ...

Waffle House has long been touted as an icon of the American South. The restaurant's consistent foregrounding as a resonant symbol of regional character proves relevant for understanding much about the people, events, and foodways. Whether approached as a comedic punchline on the Internet, television, and other popular media or elevated as a genuine touchstone of messy American modernity, Waffle House, its employees, and everyday clientele do much to transcend one-dimensional characterizat...

Risqué Business serves up the breastaurant industry, where food service, sex appeal, identity, and gender politics mix.Risqué Business explores the rise and ongoing cultural reckoning of "breastaurants": sports bar–style restaurants like Hooters and Twin Peaks, which have long relied on the sexualized presentation of female servers to attract a mostly straight, male clientele. Ty Matejowsky, professor of anthropology at the Univer...

The governance of natural resources used by many individuals in common is an issue of increasing concern to policy analysts. Both state control and privatization of resources have been advocated, but neither the state nor the market have been uniformly successful in solving common pool resource problems. After critiquing the foundations of policy analysis as applied to natural resources, Elinor Ostrom here provides a unique body of empirical data to explore conditions under which common po...

**A New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book • Named one of the Best Books of the Year by TIME, NPR, Elle, and The Boston Globe“Searing… rigorously researched but never stuffy… Gilbert has compiled perhaps the first comprehensive examination of turn-of-the-millennium mainstream, cool-kid trends and ephemera, and how they were largely molded by those in power to sell a generation of girls and young women reality-warping lies.” —

What makes us happy? It's not wealth, youth, beauty, or intelligence, says Dan Buettner. In fact, most of us have the keys within our grasp. Circling the globe to study the world's happiest populations, Buettner has spotted several common principles that can unlock the doors to true contentment with our lives. Working with leading researchers, Buettner identifies the happiest region on each of four continents. He explores why these populations say they are happier than anyone else, and wha...

A hilarious, thoughtful, and in-depth exploration of the pleasures and perils of modern romance from one of this generation's most popular and sharpest comedic voicesAt some point, every one of us embarks on a journey to find love. We meet people, date, get into and out of relationships, all with the hope of finding someone with whom we share a deep connection. This seems standard now, but it's wildly different from what people did even just decades ago. Single peo...