About additional materials:
All the course materials are uploaded. Most of them were shown and used in the previous assignments, so most of them should be read again. In addition, it is NOT necessary to read and use all the course materials. Be free to use some of them if you need.
Instructions:
ATH Food, Taste, and Desire
Final paper guidelines
Research paper: 10-12 pages, double spaced, 12 pt. For this paper you can choose any topic you want to pursue, however, there are three conditions:
1) the paper has to deal with issues of food, taste, desire/food consumption; its important that you speak about people/a society and integrate local perspectives.
2) it has to be an anthropological analysis (use class discussions and insights from our readings; include ethnographic research (secondary sources are fine) and qualitative data; integrate natives point of view; use cultural relativism; contextualize information within a broader historical and cultural framework of a particular society or community).
3) the paper has to be based on ethnographic data. Although you will not be able to
conduct a research, you should try to step in scholars shoes and find as much data as possible. You can use quantitative data (statistical analysis, surveys, etc.), but it is a requirement that your quantitative data will be supplemented by qualitative data (ethnographic accounts, unstructured interviews, etc.). Peoples commentaries online, archival material, journal articles, news commentaries, ethnographies written by other scholars, etc. will help you to build your own case. If you have a chance to conduct interviews or conduct participant observation, it would enrich your paper!
The structure of the paper:
1. Introduction. In the introduction you have to say what will you be arguing in your paper (your major thesis that you will substantiate with the data) (1 page);
2. Short discussion of data and methods (what kind of data you were able to collect; what methods did you/others use to gather your/their data (1 page);
3. Discussion of literature you reviewed, what other authors claim about the topic under consideration (1-2 pages);
4. Major discussion and analysis (8-9 pages);
5. Conclusions that critically reflect on your findings and answer the questions (1 page):
what does my case study tell about food, taste, desire/food consumption; and
how does it advance our knowledge about similar processes in the world?
Please cite! Keep visual information in your files, you may need it for a power point presentation at the end of the course.
Your research paper is 25%.
About the course:
This course explores food consumption as a meaningful practice embedded in local, national, and global relations and in social, economic, and political contexts. It explores how consumption of food mediates fashioning of a self, community, nation and the state; how by consuming food people reproduce power, authority, hierarchy as well as values and meanings; and how food economies invest in shaping needs, tastes, and desires as well as peoples bodies; how emotions, moralities and aesthetics are reproduced at supermarkets and dinner tables. It embraces food historically as well as an object of political economy, post/structuralism and semiotic analysis. The course will incorporate some experiential exercises, such as chocolate tasting.
