ANTH 479 A: Advanced Topics in Medical Anthropology

Anth 479: Special Topics: Reading Ethnographies of Food and Eating (3 credits)

Instructor: Ann Anagnost

Class Time: 2:30-5:20 pm

Place: DEN 113

Useful Links:

ANTH 489: Anthropology Praticum: Optional 2 credits for ANTH 479 students.

ANTH 411: The Culture and Politics of Food in Italy (Study Abroad, Autumn 2024)

Registration Link for Michael Twitty's Live Streamed Talk

Volunteer Sign Up for A Humble Feast

Reading Ethnographies of Food and Eating is intended as an undergraduate seminar organized along the lines of a book club. We will be reading three full-length books, which are listed below. Class time will be largely devoted to developing discussion as well as viewing visual media closely connected to the reading assignments.

Introducing the Books:

Michael Twitty, The Cooking Gene (This link is for the audio book available through the UW Library Portal, I recommend purchasing either the paperback or Kindle version.)

“A renowned culinary historian offers a fresh perspective on our most divisive cultural issue, race, in this illuminating memoir of Southern cuisine and food culture that traces his ancestry—both black and white—through food, from Africa to America and slavery to freedom.” Twitty’s book helps the reader to recognize fully the legacy of slavery that hangs on the American polity as an unpaid debt. It is a work that both challenges our understanding of the past while also offering us a vision for racial healing.

Michael Twitty will be visiting the UW in late January to present his Danz Lecture on January 24, 6:30 pm at Town Hall. The instructor can provide students with a ticket to the in-person event, which is currently sold out. The link for the live stream and recorded talk can be found in the class schedule below.

David Giles, A Mass Conspiracy to Feed People (ebook)

“Giles documents the work of Food Not Bombs (FNB), a global movement of grassroots soup kitchens that recover wasted grocery surpluses and redistribute them to those in need. He explores FNB's urban contexts: the global cities in which late-capitalist economies and unsustainable consumption precipitate excess, inequality, food waste, and hunger.” It should be especially interesting to the extent that some of the research took place in Seattle and can give us some critical perspective on our contemporary urban environment.

Harris Solomon, Metabolic Living: Food, Fat, and the Absorption of Illness in India (ebook)

“The popular narrative of "globesity" posits that the adoption of Western diets is intensifying obesity and diabetes in the Global South and that disordered metabolisms are the embodied consequence of globalization and excess. In Metabolic Living Harris Solomon recasts these narratives by examining how people in Mumbai, India, experience the porosity between food, fat, the body, and the city. Solomon contends that obesity and diabetes pose a problem of absorption between body and environment.” For students who have taken ANTH 311, you will see a connecting theme with how bodies come to express the economies and environments in which they are embedded.

Class Format:

This is a reading and discussion class. Attendance is critical for the success of this class. If you are not able to attend in person, you should not consider taking this class.

Due to class holidays, we will have only 6 in-person class times altogether. Each of these class meetings has a discussion board where students are asked to submit a discussion post that should suggest topics for in-class discussion. After they have posted, students are also asked to respond to at least one other student's post to get full credit.

Grading will be based on participation in the Discussion Boards and in-class discussion activities as follows:

Grades will be calculated as follows: The total number of points will be multiplied by 4 and divided by 100 to get a 4 point grade equivalent.

Discussion Prompts:

The content of the discussion posts can take different forms. Here are a few suggestions to prompt your approach:

• Identify a critical term or a particular theoretical framing that the author is using. Does it help you view something in a new and mind-altering way?
• Identify an "aha!" moment that particularly struck you in what you are learning from the reading.
• Make a connection between the reading assignments and the films assigned for this course. How does the visual material complement or complicate your understanding of the written material.
• Identify a passage that you are wanting to understand more clearly. What is not clear to you and what might help you to comprehend what the author is saying.

To get full credit for your post, it is required that you include at least one quote from the reading as a springboard for your thinking. Be sure to include a page number or a time stamp (if it is an audio book). The posts should be 250-400 words (a couple of "meaty" paragraphs).

Your responses should aim for about 150-300 words in length. They should help develop an aspect of the other's post by expanding on it or making another connection with your own post or with the course materials.

A good discussion should have space for multiple views. I ask students to be respectful in their communications in the class to ensure an inclusive environment for learning.

The discussion board posts are also a useful tool for preparing your contributions to the in-class discussions. 

Class Schedule: