ANTH 361 A: Anthropology of Food

This course will be held online at the time listed in the time schedule. Class meeting content will be recorded for those who are unable to attend synchronously.

Instructor: Ann Anagnost (anagnost@uw.edu)

Place and Time: T, Th, 2:30-4:20 pm, Online

Office Hours: Send your queries by email. We can also set up an individual meeting on Zoom or FaceTime.

Useful Links:

Short Reading Assignments 

Powerpoints 

Cooking Activities

The special theme for this course is “Nurturing Life in a Time of Pandemic.” We continue to face significant challenges due to the pandemic. Many of the readings will remain the same from earlier quarters, with a few additions, with a special focus on what lessons we can learn to help us in our present circumstances. The tricky balance I am trying to strike here is how to face the challenges of a society rapidly being overwhelmed by the scope and scale of the pandemic, without being overwhelmed ourselves. I don’t want to make the course too heavy, but rather to open up some hopeful spaces for thinking how things could be otherwise and hopefully to imagine a practical politics to achieve it.

In light of this, we will begin by looking at two current discussions in the humanities: (a) the politics of care and (2) broken worlds thinking.

Politics of Care: Never has a crisis more clearly revealed the dangers of a lack of universal healthcare for the public health. The COVID virus  transcends all boundaries: race, class, nation, age, while also revealing the fragile infrastructure of our health care systems and a failure of an organized governmental response at the federal level that affects poor people more dramatically. What should be our desired model for care in this instance? And how do we endeavor in ways large and small to advocate for it? Our first reading “Radical Care for Uncertain Times” will address these questions.

Broken Worlds Thinking: Our second reading will introduce us to a critical querying of the importance of maintenance and repair in a neoliberal culture focused, perhaps too insistently, on innovation and capital accumulation at the expense of sustainability and resilience.

Main Course: The third reading on food and the good life will then lead us into the central focus of the course on food as an embodied aspect of culture. We will be exploring the intersection of anthropological writings about food culture and the senses, and other topics such as food and identity, food and memory, the power of food to make community, and food as a means to construct ethical selfhood. But throughout, we will also continue to focus on how our explorations might be  a resource to nurture ourselves and others in need in a time of pandemic. What lessons can we learn to help us in our current situation?

The Logistics of Remote Learning.

• Each class will be recorded for students unable to attend at the regularly scheduled time.
• The class discussions will be live on Zoom during the regular classroom hours if we can make it work efficiently. 
• Students have the option of having their cameras off or on during discussion. If you have your camera off, please display a photo to help create a sense of connection. If you don't want your camera on all the time, consider activating it when you are speaking. But I don't want camera use to discourage you from participating.
• To keep talking over each other to a minimum, I suggest you use the raised hand signal to indicate you wish to contribute and it will signal to me to call on you.
• No recording is allowed without my permission to protect student privacy according to FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act). Please do not share the access url and password for the Zoom sessions with those not enrolled for the class.
• Please observe the standard for constructive and respectful engagement in online discussions at all times.

Course Requirements.

Each set of readings will require a short reading response , about one paragraph, that will be posted on a discussion board on Canvas to generate class discussion on Zoom prior to class. A prompt will be provided, although you need not necessarily be limited by the prompt question. These responses can be highly personal, but please be aware that you are publishing them to the class. The reading responses are low stakes assignments and are ungraded but they count for points indicating completion of the assignment. To be given full credit for this assignment, you must address some aspect of the reading. The best way to do it is to identify a passage from the reading as your jumping off point for your comment. This is good practice for how to engage with the readings in the short essay assignments that are the graded portion of the course. There are altogether 16 reading sets for this course and each student is responsible for writing briefs for 10 of them, so you have some flexibility in choosing which readings to respond to. However, all students are expected to complete the readings for all sessions and be ready to discuss them in class.

The graded assignments will take the form of mini-essays (three pages in length, 750-800 words) written in response to a prompt. These mini essays will be graded on how well the writing responds to the prompt and demonstrates thoughtful processing in terms of making connections with the readings and other course materials.

The mini-essays will take the form of a writing genre called the “familiar essay.” These essays can be highly personal in connecting to your own experience but they must open up to larger questions that we are developing in this class. This means that they should demonstrate active engagement with the readings and other materials. In other words, the mode of writing is a hybrid between personal and more formal academic writing with in-text citation of the readings. I will be assigning examples of creative food writing to inspire you to do your best writing. 

We will have a peer review activity with each of these assignments. Each student will have two peer reviewers. The peer review assignments will be set up through the Canvas Website. Feedback can be given as marginal comments on the draft or through the rubric on the right side of the screen.

Originally this class included four hands-on activities with food in the Husky Den Kitchen. These activities were closely tied to the course readings and discussions for the class. Much to my regret, this will not be possible this Autumn because of the need for remote teaching. The $30 course fee has been eliminated and I urge you to spend these funds for improving your Internet access for the quarter if you can (see below for some solutions). I was really disappointed that we will not be doing these cooking activities together, but I have uploaded the worksheets for those activities on the Canvas website and encourage you to do them at home if at all possible. Moreover, I am very open to your including commentaries on your cooking activities as a form of self-care  as added material to your responses to the discussion prompts and mini-essays. Recipes and photos are welcome as additional elements to your written work.

Point Breakdown

Total: 100 points

Grades will be calculated as follows: total number of points multiplied by 4 and divided by 100 to convert to the 4.0 scale. If there is a decimal remainder of .5 or higher, it will be rounded up.

Accessing Course Activities Online

The City of Seattle has programs for low-cost, high-speed internet that cost around $10 a month, and also offers free and discounted computers and smartphones: 

https://www.seattle.gov/tech/services/internet-access/low-cost-home-internet-access-for-residents

https://www.seattle.gov/tech/services/free-and-discounted-devices

Course Materials:
All of the shorter readings are available as hyperlinks on the class schedule below. I will be adding links for powerpoint and zoom recordings as we go. The assigned books are all available as e-books) through the UW Library Portal and a link is provided for each. We will be readings significant portions of the four books listed below and the library has license for unlimited users, so online access should not be a problem. The pandemic has presented us with an economic shock as well as a public health challenge, so I have endeavored to make costs for this course as minimal as possible. The only exception to this are two videos that must be accessed through Netflix. However, Netflix has a 30-day free trial that you can use to view these materials.

Books:

David Sutton, Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory.

Carol Counihan, Around the Tuscan Table: Food, Family, and Gender in Twentieth-Century Florence.

Judith Farquhar, Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China.

Judith Farquhar and Qicheng Zhang, Ten Thousand Things: Nurturing Life in Contemporary Beijing.

Extra Credit for Service Learning (Confirmed):

Students interested in getting their hands dirty are welcome to sign up for service learning credit in Anth 489: Anthropology Practicum.  I am a gardener at the Picardo Farm Community Garden (located on 25th Ave NE about two miles from campus near to Dahl Playing Field and on the 372 bus route) and I have arranged with Alexandria Soleil, our volunteer coordinator, to set up opportunities for student volunteering. Most of the activities will be preparing beds for winter in the giving garden (growing food for local food banks), gleaning, harvesting, weeding, composting, etc.

If this location is not convenient for you, you might find another community garden closer to home. Seattle has almost 100 gardens altogether. You can find a map here. To participate, you would need to connect me up with their volunteer coordinator. If you have difficulty finding this person, let me know. Or you can volunteer in any local organization that exemplifies radical care, as we are defining it in this class.

Practicing the COVID guidelines is obligatory (social distancing, masking, hand washing, remaining out of doors, sitting out if you have been exposed to someone with COVID or are feeling symptoms). Students would need to commit to 20 hours of volunteer work for 2 credits and to deliver a short essay (3-5 pages) documenting their learning at the end of the quarter. Alex would be available at Picardo Farm to work with you in groups of 4 or less on Mondays 3-5 pm or Fridays 12-2 pm. She would also be willing to put in some weekend work parties if there is sufficient interest. I can also help direct student volunteers according to a schedule that works for everyone. So if you are not available during Alex's possible times, I may be able to fill the gap. I am stewarding a large patch for my garden neighbor who had to go east to rescue her parents from a COVID stricken elder home. I will be experimenting with winter vegetable production and lasagne composting.