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Food and foodways shape the human experience in manifold ways. From production and exchange to sharing and consumption to digestion and waste; food is deeply entangled within complex relationships of ecology and economy, heritage and identity, power and politics, labor and gender, diet and nutrition as well as space and time. This course will highlight anthropological perspectives on food and foodways to develop a profound understanding of these intricate relationships.
The subtitle “from soil to supper” is an indication of the thematic and conceptual framework of the course: Soil relates to land, locality, and ecology, and thus addresses environmental and political relationships of food. With a focus on agricultural and pastoral food systems, we will study socioeconomic as well as multispecies relationships of collaboration and exploitation that shape food cultures. Supper, as the last meal of the day, refers to food temporalities as embedded in food preparation, recipes, and specific cuisines unfolding in relation to time. Paired with the prepositions “from” and “to” it calls into question the processes and efforts involved in the production, provision, and consumption of food. By drawing on practices of fermentation, cooking, and eating, we will investigate the techniques, knowledge systems, histories, and politics of food and foodways.
The course will mainly draw on case studies from contemporary Central Asia, but as food is deeply embedded in transregional and global flows, the syllabus expands in its geographic, historical, and theoretical scope across Asia and Africa. Given that food is a key component of our everyday lives, students’ assignments include the development of small research projects within the Berlin foodscape that relates to the course’s contents as well as short presentations and writing exercises. Student research projects will be presented in digital or material form by the end of the semester.
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