This study deals with three domains of food which raise complex epistemological, political and moral issues. Through an examination of a wide range of material drawn from anthropology, history, literature and political economy, the author discusses the relationship between food and entitlement, gender, notions of the body and development. Food is shown to be a powerful metaphor for our sense of self, our social and political relations, our cosmology and our global system.

Are disputes ever really resolved, or do people need to find ways of accommodating them and living with the consequences? Can dispute settlement procedures at the local level be transferred to wider environments? In attempting to answer these questions, some of the foremost specialists in the anthropology of law and disputing behaviour examine how people in a variety of social settings, ranging from Ireland to East Africa, deal with quarrels and seek to resolve or accommodate them. This st...

First Published in 1987. Illustrates the argument that sexuality is not a `thing in itself' but a concept that can only be understood with reference to economic, political and social factors.

The essays in this volume address the displacement of natural and cultural heritage caused by disasters, whether they be dramatic natural impacts or terrible events unleashed by humankind, including holocaust and genocide. Disasters can be natural or human-made, rapid or slow, great or small, yet the impact is effectively the same; nature, people and cultural heritage are displaced or lost. Yet while heritage and place are at risk from disasters, in time,sites of suffering are sometimes re...

By addressing the issue of food and eating in Britain today this collection considers the ways in which food habits are changing and shows how social and personal identities and perceptions of health risk influence people's food choices. The articles explore, among other issues: • the family meal • wedding cakes • nostalgia and the invention of tradition • the rise of vegetarianism • the recent BSE crisis • the `creolization' of British food eating out • creation of individual identity thr...

Virtually all anthropologists undertaking fieldwork experience emotional difficulties in relating their own personal culture to the field culture. The issue of gender arises because ethnographers do fieldwork by establishing relationships, and this is done as a person of a particular age, sexual orientation, belief, educational background, ethnic identity and class. In particular it is done as men and women. Gendered Fields examines and explores the progress of feminist anthropology, the g...

African Voices, African Lives explores the world of 'Mohammed', a swahili peasant living on Mafia Island, Tanzania. Through his own words - some written, some spoken - and those of his relatives, including his ex-wife and one of his daughters, he enables us to see the world through his eyes, including the invisisble world of spirits which plays a significant role in his life. This information is gathered by Pat Caplan, the anthropologist, over almost three decades of talking and w...

Since the inception of their discipline, anthropologists have studied virtually every conceivable aspect of other peoples' morality - religion, social control, sin, virtue, evil, duty, purity and pollution. But what of the examination of anthropology itself, and of its agendas, epistemes, theories and praxes? In 1991, Raymond Firth spoke of social anthropology as an essentially moral discipline. Is such a view outmoded in a postmodern era? Do anthropological ethics have to be re-thought ea...

Anthony Cohen makes a distinct break with earlier approaches to the study of community, which treated the subject in largely structural terms. His view is interpretive and experiential, seeing the community as a cultural field with a complex of symbols whose meanings vary among its members. He delineates a concept applicable to local and ethnic communities through which people see themselves as belonging to society. The emphasis on boundary is sensitive to the circumstances in which people...

Human Beings and Freedom: An Interdisciplinary Perspective focuses on some contemporary issues relating to freedom, equality, identity and resistance from various perspectives, such as psychological, social, political, and metaphysical. In doing so it addresses topics such as the nature of human beings, political freedom, the relationship between freedom and equality, sex, gender and race, humour, and the notion of critique.Some twenty professors have contributed to this v...

The experience of colonization and the challenges of a post-colonial world have produced an explosion of new writing in English. This diverse and powerful body of literature has established a specific practice of post-colonial writing in cultures as various as India, Australia, the West Indies and Canada, and has challenged both the traditional canon and dominant ideas of literature and culture.The Empire Writes Back was the first major theoretical account of a wide range ...

Examining the relationship between strangers, embodiment and community, Strange Encounters challenges the assumptions that the stranger is simply anybody we do not recognize and instead proposes that he or she is socially constructued as somebody we already know. Using feminist and postcolonial theory this book examines the impact of multiculturalism and globalization on embodiment and community whilst considering the ethical and political implication of its critique for post-colo...