reading quotes

Food anthropology reading:
"food systems remind us of the persuasive role of food in human life. Next to breathing, eating is perhaps the most essential of all human activities, and one with which much of social life is entwined."

"food is used to comment on the sacred and reenact venerated stories."
"food "binds" people to their faiths through "powerful links" between food and memory"

"rituals and taboos that practitioners understand at least in partly in symbolic terms often serve either to reinforce or to question hierarchical power relations or access to material goods."

"food serves both to solidify group membership and to set groups apart."

"..an ethnic cuisine is associated with a geographically and/or historically defined eating community."

"eating is important both for its own sake since food is utterly essential to human existence."

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An Ethnography of dinner entertainment in japan

"Superficial understanding of a culture is often said to be worse than no understanding at all."
"..it gives one a false conviction that he knows it all."

"both guests and hosts are supposed to say what they do not mean."
"...moreover that they know what others really meant to say but did not say."

"face to face interaction is like a drama. in which each actor knows what the others are supposed to say.


"Japanese folklorists tell us that sake was originally a sacred beverage produced as a offering to the gods. Mortals drank sake in a ceremony called naorae."

"Drinking sake now is a completely secularized affair; its sacredness is gone. But still, its 'communal' functions are deeply embedded in ordinary dinner entertainment because the etiquette and numerous rules of sake drinking insures conviviality and communion.


"One important rule to be followed in dinner entertainment of a small party of five or six persons is to center the conversation of the entire group on one topic."


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