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Oral Presentation Session - Cosponsored Status Awarded
Sponsored by: Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition
Cosponsored by: Society for Linguistic Anthropology
Of interest to: Practicing and Applied Anthropologists
Primary Theme: Ethics
Secondary Theme: Exchange
To treat something as food is to attribute it with intrinsic value: the capacity to fulfill our constant and essential need for nourishment. As such, food is situated at the intersection of multiple forms of “value” (c.f. Graeber 2001):
1) Economic value: bought, sold, bartered, and traded, food is at the foundation of economic activity in all social groups. Through food, divisions of labor and wealth are materialized and symbolically enacted (Richards 1939; Mintz 1986; Bestor 2001).
2) Ethical values: from food taboos to free trade, the consumption and production of food are imbued with social meaning through morally saturated discourses (Wilk 2001; Karrebæk 2012; Carrier & Luetchford 2012; Paxon 2012; Gal 2013; Weiss 2016)
3) Linguistic value: Food “talks,” i.e. it creates value in the form of meaningful difference in a system of differences. Food bears indexical meaning, of multiple orders (Silverstein 2003), and food and language function as intertwined semiotic systems (Riley & Cavanaugh 2017; Cavanaugh et al. 2014).
Analyzing food consumption and production, this panel proposes a semiotic approach to “value” that draws attention to entanglements between various forms of value and examines the social work through which individuals and groups attempt to create and convert value. How do social actors attempt to transform moral values into economic worth? By what semiotic processes are foods’ indexical meanings converted to political-economic status? How, in valuing some foods, do we denigrate others, and the people who consume them? Finally, how might food provide a lens into shifting values, illuminating political-economic transformations?
This panel examines the ways that food is made and moved, talked about and tasted, paying careful attention to the political economic contexts in which foods take on specific social meanings and moral valence. It considers the dialectic interplay of food and language (spoken and written) in processes of value production and reconfiguration. We are particularly interested in the ways social actors work to transport values associated with foods across media, contexts, and scales, transforming foods’ social meaning in the process. Through investigation of value-laden discourses in diverse institutional contexts (family meals, restaurants, marketing, public health campaigns, bureaucratic regulations, etc.), this panel draws scholarship on food and language together with investigations of economics and morality to shed light on the ways that various forms of value are intertwined and amplified, collapsed and combined through food.
Kathleen Riley
Instructor
Rutgers University
Laura Brown
Assistant Professor
University of Pittsburgh
Deborah Heath
Lewis & Clark College
Richard Wilk
Indiana University
Kerri Lesh
University of Nevada, Reno
Martha Karrebaek
Associate Professor
University of Copenhagen
Chelsie Yount-Andre
Université de Montpellier, France
Chelsie Yount-Andre
Université de Montpellier, France