• DOI:10.1146/ANNUREV.ANTHRO.32.032702.131011
• Corpus ID: 7808250

The Anthropology of Food and Eating

@article{Mintz2002TheAO,
  title={The Anthropology of Food and Eating},
  author={Sidney Wilfred Mintz and Christine M. Du Bois},
  journal={Annual Review of Anthropology},
  year={2002},
  volume={31},
  pages={99-119}
}

• S. Mintz, C. Bois
• Published 1 October 2002
• Sociology
• Annual Review of Anthropology

▪ Abstract The study of food and eating has a long history in anthropology, beginning in the nineteenth century with Garrick Mallery and William Robertson Smith. This review notes landmark studies prior to the 1980s, sketching the history of the subfield. We concentrate primarily, however, on works published after 1984. We contend that the study of food and eating is important both for its own sake since food is utterly essential to human existence (and often insufficiently available) and because the subfield has proved valuable for debating and advancing anthropological theory and research methods. Food studies have illuminated broad societal processes such as political-economic value-creation, symbolic value-creation, and the social construction of memory. Such studies have also proved an important arena for debating the relative merits of cultural and historical materialism vs. structuralist or symbolic explanations for human behavior, and for refining our understanding of variation in informants' resp...