The Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender, Meaning and Power [Paperback]

Carole M. Counihan (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0415921937 | ISBN-13: 978-0415921930 | Publication Date: July 22, 1999 | Edition: 1

The Anthropology of Food and Body explores the way that making, eating, and thinking about food reveal culturally determined gender-power relations in diverse societies. This book brings feminist and anthropological theories to bear on these provocative issues and will interest anyone investigating the relationship between food, the body, and cultural notions of gender.

Editorial Reviews

Review

The Anthropology of Food and Bodyoffers a bountiful, textured collection of essays, some previously published, some part of the author's ongoing work, some written expressly for this volume.
–Gastronomica

This collection...should be of special interest to readers in women's studies, gender studies, and foods-and nutrition studies....All levels.
–Choice

About the Author

Carole M. Counihan is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Women's Studies at Millersville University. She is co-editor of Food and Culture (Routledge, 1997), and of Food and Gender: Identity and Power (1998).

Product Details

• Paperback: 264 pages
• Publisher: Routledge; 1 edition (July 22, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0415921937
• ISBN-13: 978-0415921930
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #378,271 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Carole M. Counihan is Professor of Anthropology at Millersville University in Pennsylvania. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, she earned a BA in history cum laude from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Massachusetts. Counihan's research centers on food, culture, gender, and identity in the United States and Italy. She conducted fieldwork in Bosa (Sardinia) and Florence (Tuscany), Italy during the 1970s and 1980s, and published "Around the Tuscan Table: Food, Family and Gender in Twentieth Century Florence" in 2004. Long fascinated with women's complex relationship with food and body, she explored gender, food, body, reproduction, and culture in her book "The Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender, Meaning, and Power" (Routledge, 1999). She is editor of "Food in the USA: A Reader" (Routledge 2002) and, with Penny Van Esterik, of "Food and Culture: A Reader" (Routledge 2008). She conducted fieldwork from 1996-2006 in a Hispanic community in Colorado, collecting food-centered life histories from nineteen women. Based on this research and supported by a 2005-2006 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, she authored "A Tortilla Is Like Life: Food and Culture in the San Luis Valley of Colorado" (University of Texas Press, 2009). She is editor of the scholarly journal "Food and Foodways." Counihan was a visiting professor at the University of Gastronomic Sciences Masters Program in Colorno (Parma), Italy, during Spring 2009 where she began a new ethnographic research project on food activism in local chapters of the Slow Food movement.