{"id":4177,"date":"2019-05-28T20:01:19","date_gmt":"2019-05-28T10:01:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/casestudyhelp.com\/sample-questions\/?p=4177"},"modified":"2019-09-20T18:35:51","modified_gmt":"2019-09-20T08:35:51","slug":"anthropology-food-and-gender-lecture-case-study-questions-and-answers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/casestudyhelp.com\/sample-questions\/anthropology-food-and-gender-lecture-case-study-questions-and-answers\/","title":{"rendered":"Anthropology Food and Gender Lecture Case Study Questions and Answers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Food and gender<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Anth 203, Week 4<\/strong><\/p>\n<h2 style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Today\u2019s lecture<\/strong><\/h2>\n<ol style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n<li>Food as a symbolic How does food encode male- ness\/masculinity and female-ness\/femininity? Our main example Hua systems of classification in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea. (Anna Meigs, Jeffrey Sobal)<\/li>\n<li>Gendered <em>roles <\/em>and the question of power: how is food production, preparation and consumption gendered? (Carole Counihan, Anne Allison)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/casestudyhelp.com\/sample-questions\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/Food.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-4706\" src=\"https:\/\/casestudyhelp.com\/sample-questions\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/Food.png\" alt=\"Food\" width=\"481\" height=\"365\" srcset=\"https:\/\/casestudyhelp.com\/sample-questions\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/Food.png 481w, https:\/\/casestudyhelp.com\/sample-questions\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/Food-300x228.png 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 481px) 100vw, 481px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Symbolic associations<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n<li>By \u2018symbol\u2019 I mean an object or a sign or an image that another thing <em>refers <\/em>to \u2013 but the relationship between them is entirely A steak does not look like a man! This relationship is arbitrary but it\u2019s also cultural: shared meanings allow us to see the relationship between the image and the thing it refers to.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2 style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Hua-speaking people, Eastern Highlands, Papua New Guinea<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Hua gardens<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n<li>Strong emphasis on gardening, as well as raising livestock such as pig<\/li>\n<li>Hua people eat Pacific staple&#8211;the sweet potato. Also taro, yam, bananas, sugar cane, leafy greens<\/li>\n<li>After WW1, Australia assumes governance of whole territory, parts of which were formerly a German colony<\/li>\n<li>In 1940s, Australian patrol officers made contact with diverse groups of people living in the highlands<\/li>\n<li>Corn, potatoes, peanuts, beans, tomatoes, cabbage grown since the 1950s<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Meigs\u2019 general argument<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n<li>Hua conceive of some foods as cold, wet, soft, fertile and fast- growing, and this is associated with<\/li>\n<li>Hot, dry, hard, infertile, slow-growing foods are associated with masculinity<\/li>\n<li>Women can become more like men by consuming these kinds of foods; men avoid foods associated with female-ness.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>What\u2019s food got to do with sex?<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n<li>Humans have an instinctual \u2018drive\u2019 to quell our hunger and to fulfill our sexual urges, according to Freud<\/li>\n<li>Both food and sex subject to taboos and prohibitions. For example, as we have discussed, only a certain range of edible substances in the environment are classified as edible. And only a certain range of potential sexual partners in our social world are categorised as suitable sexual partners<\/li>\n<li>The breast is a source of nourishment, also source of sexual pleasure<\/li>\n<li>Often a linguistic and metaphoric link between being \u2018full\u2019, being \u2018fulfilled\u2019, and being sexually fulfilled<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Early anthropological observations of Hua life:<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n<li>In rituals, Hua men expel bodily substances seen as female<\/li>\n<li>Contact with menstrual blood to be avoided<\/li>\n<li>Sex assumed to involve the loss of a substance<\/li>\n<li>Men live together in village longhouse<\/li>\n<li>Women work certain sections of the garden<\/li>\n<li>Anthropologists concluded \u201cHua women live in state of submission\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Absolute and relative food rules<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Meigs describes two types of Hua food rules:<\/strong><\/p>\n<ol style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n<li>Absolute rules: these rules refer to the intrinsic qualities the food is assumed to always carry<\/li>\n<li>Relative rules: these rules refer to the status of the person who was involved in producing or preparing the food<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Examples of absolute rules<\/strong><\/p>\n<ol style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n<li>A male undergoing initiation may not eat foods that are red or that release a reddish<\/li>\n<li>A male undergoing initiation may not eat foods that smell\u00a0<em>be\u2019ftu<\/em><\/li>\n<li>A male undergoing initiation must eat soups made out of certain leafy greens that are regarded as good for growth<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Examples of relative rules<\/strong><\/p>\n<ol style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n<li>A mature initiated male may not eat leafy green vegetables picked by his real or classificatory wife or first-born child<\/li>\n<li>An adult must not eat a pig raised by, or wild animal shot by, or the prize garden produce cultivated by his or her firstborn child or agemates, or her co-wives<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Why not?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong><em>Nu <\/em>or \u2018living essence\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">For Hua people, all living things have a <em>nu<\/em>, which Meigs calls \u2018a living essence\u2019. This can be transmitted from one living thing to another: from a plant to a person, from one person to another. Hua parents are understood to give their <em>nu <\/em>to their children over time as they nurture them. The aging process involves the transfer of <em>nu <\/em>from parents to children, parents weaken as their children absorb this energy. So the transfer of <em>nu <\/em>can be positive or negative <em>\u2013 nu <\/em>can nourish or pollute.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Absolute rules that apply to the male initiate<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Revulsion? Or, Reverence?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Consider the fact that:<\/p>\n<ol style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n<li>Hua males imitated menstruation<\/li>\n<li>Hua males, in certain contexts, claimed that men could become pregnant<\/li>\n<li>Hua males <em>secretly <\/em>eat foods associated with qualities of women<\/li>\n<li>Postmenopausal women are initiated into secret male society<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Concluding thoughts on Meigs<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n<li>Hua people traditionally held strong symbolic associations between certain foods and women\u2019s sexuality: these foods are polluting<\/li>\n<li>Tabooed for male initiates<\/li>\n<li>At first, this symbolic system seems to suggest both a rigid separation between maleness and femaleness and an intense aversion to female sexuality<\/li>\n<li>Or does it? Meigs sees an envy and secret desire to emulate women\u2019s capacity to reproduce and nurture life \u2013 as food providers and mothers<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Gendered symbols?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a title=\"Order Now\" href=\"https:\/\/casestudyhelp.com\/MyOrder.php\" target=\"_blank\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-4174 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/casestudyhelp.com\/sample-questions\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/assignment-help.jpg\" alt=\"assignment-help\" width=\"669\" height=\"148\" srcset=\"https:\/\/casestudyhelp.com\/sample-questions\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/assignment-help.jpg 669w, https:\/\/casestudyhelp.com\/sample-questions\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/assignment-help-300x66.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 669px) 100vw, 669px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Gendered Advertisements?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Food-centred activities, gender and power<\/p>\n<ul style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n<li>\u2026 \u201cfood-centred activities and meanings [are significant] to the constitution of gender relations and identities across \u201d<\/li>\n<li>\u201cMen\u2019s and women\u2019s ability to produce, provide and distribute and consume food is a key measure of their This ability varies according to their culture, their class, and their family organization, and the overall economic structure of their society.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">From Carole Counihan, introduction to \u2018Food and Gender: Identity and Power\u2019, p. 1; p. 2.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>This becomes a question of power<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n<li>Throughout most of the twentieth century, women held key roles surrounding food in Western societies<\/li>\n<li>This is such an important task: they are reproducing life! So women are in a <em>powerful <\/em>position?<\/li>\n<li>But is this kind of work (\u2018reproductive labour\u2019 undertaken in the \u2018domestic sphere\u2019) valued?<\/li>\n<li>Or, are women in a <em>subservient <\/em>position? Always giving, nurturing others, sublimating their own desires to satisfy others\u2019 needs?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Insights from feminist food studies<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n<li>Concept of reproductive labour \u2013 the work undertaken inside the home, not historically recognised as<\/li>\n<li>Reproductive labour includes emotional\/relationship work as well as arduous, necessary physical work<\/li>\n<li>Both forms of work reproduce family life<\/li>\n<li>Gender intersects with race, sexuality, class<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Women as \u2018gatekeepers\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n<li>If women make decisions about food purchasing, do the purchasing, store and prepare food<\/li>\n<li>Then, should we conclude they thus \u2018control the flow of food into the family\u2019?<\/li>\n<li>Is this a position of power?<\/li>\n<li>Or, are women in a <em>subservient <\/em>position? Always giving, nurturing, thinking of others, sublimating their own desires to satisfy others\u2019 needs?<\/li>\n<li>McIntosh and Zey argue, \u2018<em>Responsibility <\/em>is not equivalent to\u00a0<em>control<\/em>.\u2019 (p. 318)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Example 1: Sardinia, Italy<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n<li>Up until the 1960s, bread had been central to Sardinian life for centuries<\/li>\n<li>Women baked together: \u201cthey exchanged and intermingled their lives: their gossip, their skills, their pasts, their loves and their losses\u201d<\/li>\n<li>Sardinian meals \u201cinvolved consumption of a relative\u2019s labour: one\u2019s father, brother, or son in the wheat; one\u2019s mother, sister or daughter in the loaf. Consumption of bread reaffirmed the complementarity of men and women and the nuclear family structure\u2026\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Example 1 ctd<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n<li>Grain cultivation disappears, women begin buying bread from the bakery \u2013 men are bakers!<\/li>\n<li><em>Shopping <\/em>for food becomes the more important food-centred activity women undertake<\/li>\n<li>It is a more impersonal food-centred activity<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Example 2: Florence, Italy in the early 1980s<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">\u201cThe Florentine woman is born into a world that defines the constituents of femininity as family, nurturance, and altruism. Through providing food, Florentine women sustain life in others and give their own lives meaning.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Younger women \u201cno longer content to be cloistered in their homes with a life of altruistic devotion to their family\u201d.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Meal provisioning does not shift from women to men, but from women in the home to <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">meals provided out of the home<\/span>.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Example 3: Antonito, San Luis Valley, Colorado<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n<li>Women had most of the responsibility for domestic work in the first half of twentieth century<\/li>\n<li>Women\u2019s relationship to sources of food linked them to the land, and to waterways \u2013 had a spiritual component<\/li>\n<li>While division of labour on farms and ranches was gendered, this was actually quite malleable (ie. If there was no son, girls did \u2018boy jobs\u2019)<\/li>\n<li>Harsh climate \u2013 emphasis on food preservation, women contributed much of the work for this<\/li>\n<li>When women moved into the workforce, many took roles that involved food<\/li>\n<li>Some women explicitly rejected the roles associated with cooking, child reading and house keeping<\/li>\n<li>Others used cooking as a means of creativity and self-expression<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Example 4: Japanese <em>obento <\/em>boxes (focus of this week\u2019s tutorials)<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n<li>Japanese motherhood involves labour and devotion<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n<li>Both mother and child are being watched, judged, and <em>constructed<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n<li>Making the obento box involves time, effort (labour)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n<li>Motherhood is also a state ideology \u2018working through children at home and at school and through such mother-imprinted labour that a child carries from home to school as the obento\u2019<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Example 5: Destitute women in Tanzania<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n<li>Anthropologist Karen Coen Flynn works with women who made a transition from the countryside where they depended on food grown by their families to town where they relied on purchased foods<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Several ways women acquire food or the money to purchase it:<\/p>\n<ul style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n<li>Exchanging sex for food, either through informal relationships with lovers (<em>malaya<\/em>), compensated with food, drink, clothing or OR, they \u2018scrounge\u2019, where quick, informal sex was performed to meet basic food needs<\/li>\n<li>Establish food-groups, which combine resources and equally share out meal, which is cooked by women<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>An ambiguous example: the BBQ!<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n<li>According to Mary Douglas the BBQ acts as a \u2018bridge between intimacy and difference\u2019<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n<li>Why is <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">c<\/span> <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">ooking the BBQ<\/span> often seen as a male role, while cooking in the kitchen, and especially baking, seen as a women\u2019s role?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"text-align: justify;\">Do you think this is changing?<\/li>\n<li style=\"text-align: justify;\">BBQing and Australian <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">n<\/span> <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">ational i dentity<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<script type=\"text\/javascript\" charset=\"utf-8\" src=\"http:\/\/w.sharethis.com\/widget\/?wp=6.2.9\"><\/script>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Food and gender Anth 203, Week 4 Today\u2019s lecture Food as a symbolic How does food encode male- ness\/masculinity and female-ness\/femininity? Our main example Hua systems of classification in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea. (Anna Meigs, Jeffrey Sobal) Gendered roles and the question of power: how is food production, preparation and consumption gendered? [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1862],"tags":[1871,1957,1870,1866,1865,1960,1182,1863,1864,1959,1958],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/casestudyhelp.com\/sample-questions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4177"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/casestudyhelp.com\/sample-questions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/casestudyhelp.com\/sample-questions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casestudyhelp.com\/sample-questions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casestudyhelp.com\/sample-questions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4177"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/casestudyhelp.com\/sample-questions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4177\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4707,"href":"https:\/\/casestudyhelp.com\/sample-questions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4177\/revisions\/4707"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/casestudyhelp.com\/sample-questions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casestudyhelp.com\/sample-questions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casestudyhelp.com\/sample-questions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}