Food, Memory and Meaning: The Symbolic and Social Nature of Food Events

1994 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 664-685 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah Lupton
Keyword(s):  
Social Relationships ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Eating Habits ◽  
Behavioural Change ◽  
Childhood Memories ◽  
Memory Work ◽  
Social Nature ◽  
The Social ◽  
Symbolic Meanings ◽  
Consumption Practices

Food preparation and consumption practices are considered integral to the maintenance or deterioration of bodily health. As a consequence, individuals in western societies are regularly exhorted to follow health guidelines in their everyday diets. However many fail to heed this advice. Various reasons have been proposed for lack of behavioural change, but few have fully considered the social function and symbolic meanings of food and eating. This paper presents the findings of an exploratory study using the innovative qualitative research method of memory-work to uncover the meanings surrounding food practices in developed societies. The data used are childhood memories about food written by students at an Australian university. The memories are examined for common themes and patterns, revealing important aspects of the ways in which food contributes to social relationships and cultural practices. The findings provide explanations for individuals' adherence to certain eating habits and avoidance of others, and point the way towards the further application of memory-work to elucidate the meanings and symbolic role played by food in western societies.

scholarly journals The Social Function of Imitation in Development

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harriet Over
Keyword(s):  
Social Development ◽  
Cultural Differences ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
Social Relationship ◽  
Social Process ◽  
Social Function ◽  
Third Parties ◽  
Social Nature ◽  
Social Pressures ◽  
The Social

Imitation is a deeply social process. Here, I review evidence that children use imitation as a means by which to affiliate with others. For example, children imitate the actions of others more closely when they seek a positive social relationship with them and respond positively to being imitated. Furthermore, children infer something of the relationships between third parties by observing their imitative exchanges. Understanding the social nature of imitation requires exploring the nature of the social relationships between children and the individuals they imitate. Thus, in addition to discussing children's own goals in imitative situations, I review the social pressures children experience to imitate in particular ways, learning to conform to the conventions and rituals of their group. In the latter part of this article, I discuss the extent to which this perspective on imitation can help us to understand broader topics within social development, including the origins of human cultural differences.

More than convenience: the role of habitus in understanding the food choices of fast food workers

2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (5) ◽  
pp. 800-815 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Woodhall-Melnik ◽  
Flora I Matheson
Keyword(s):  
Social Relationships ◽  
Family Environment ◽  
Fast Food ◽  
Eating Habits ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Food Choices ◽  
The Family ◽  
Consumption Practices ◽  
Conscious Process ◽  
Food Workers

This article explores the consumption practices of fast food workers through the lens of Bourdieu, specifically his notion of habitus. The authors address a gap in knowledge in the field of fast food work and explore the ways that the family environment and social relationships outside the family shape adult food choices using qualitative interviews with 40 fast food workers. Most fast food workers eat fast food when they are at work but their consumption patterns and choices reflect familial, cultural and class-based eating patterns and learning in adult social relationships (e.g., eating practices with friends). Some engage in a deliberate (conscious) process in their eating habits. The findings suggest that structure, disposition and conscious thought may influence food consumption.

scholarly journals Afterword

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 430-436
Author(s):  
Hedda Reindl-Kiel
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Social System ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Eating Habits ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
The West ◽  
The Social

Abstract The paper questions the function of the anti-Ottoman approach that, until recently, prevailed in Southeastern European historiography. This mindset and its concomitant attitudes were steps in nation building. A short comparison of the Ottoman social system with the social structures of countries in the region that did not come under direct Ottoman rule shows only minor differences. Thus, the adoption of Ottoman cultural practices including material culture was not a difficult choice. At the same time, we see individuals and whole groups whose lifestyles were oriented toward the West. Changing eating habits serve as an illustration for this phenomenon.

scholarly journals Early emerging system for reasoning about the social nature of food

2016 ◽  
Vol 113 (34) ◽  
pp. 9480-9485 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zoe Liberman ◽  
Amanda L. Woodward ◽  
Kathleen R. Sullivan ◽  
Katherine D. Kinzler
Keyword(s):  
Social Relationships ◽  
Food Selection ◽  
Food Preferences ◽  
Food Choices ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Social Reasoning ◽  
Social Nature ◽  
The Social ◽  
Ancient Problem ◽  
Generalize Information

Selecting appropriate foods is a complex and evolutionarily ancient problem, yet past studies have revealed little evidence of adaptations present in infancy that support sophisticated reasoning about perceptual properties of food. We propose that humans have an early-emerging system for reasoning about the social nature of food selection. Specifically, infants’ reasoning about food choice is tied to their thinking about agents’ intentions and social relationships. Whereas infants do not expect people to like the same objects, infants view food preferences as meaningfully shared across individuals. Infants’ reasoning about food preferences is fundamentally social: They generalize food preferences across individuals who affiliate, or who speak a common language, but not across individuals who socially disengage or who speak different languages. Importantly, infants’ reasoning about food preferences is flexibly calibrated to their own experiences: Tests of bilingual babies reveal that an infant’s sociolinguistic background influences whether she will constrain her generalization of food preferences to people who speak the same language. Additionally, infants’ systems for reasoning about food is differentially responsive to positive and negative information. Infants generalize information about food disgust across all people, regardless of those people’s social identities. Thus, whereas food preferences are seen as embedded within social groups, disgust is interpreted as socially universal, which could help infants avoid potentially dangerous foods. These studies reveal an early-emerging system for thinking about food that incorporates social reasoning about agents and their relationships, and allows infants to make abstract, flexible, adaptive inferences to interpret others’ food choices.

THE SOCIAL NATURE OF INFORMATION AND THE ROLE OF TRUST

2002 ◽  
Vol 11 (03n04) ◽  
pp. 381-403 ◽  
Author(s):  
CRISTIANO CASTELFRANCHI
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
Social Aspects ◽  
Social Construct ◽  
Social Nature ◽  
Interacting Agents ◽  
Information Agents ◽  
The Social ◽  
Nature Of Information

In this paper, I claim that "information" is a social construct, is created and tailored on purpose by somebody for somebody else or collectively, accepted, believed, or propagated through social interactions. In particular, I argue about the essential social nature of several crucial aspects of information in IT and specifically in relation to Information Agents. After situating this view of information within the broader perspective of Social Artificial Intelligence — the new AI paradigm — I analyize the intrinsic social aspects of information ontology, search and access, presentation, overload, credibility and sources, value. The issue of real "collaboration" in providing information deserves special attention and I introduce our theory of over-help and of the ability to provide something different from what is requested in order to satisfy the real need beyond the request. In the second part, I focus on the crucial role of trust (an intrinsically social and cognitive notion) for dealing with information and sources especially on the web. My objective is to claim that: if information per se is a social construct, then its technology should be socially designed and integrated, and that machines must be involved in real social relationships because they have to mediate them among humans. It is necessary incorporating some part of this social knowledge and capability in the information technology itself, especially in adaptive and interacting "agents" and MAS.

Individuals as Social Relationships: 18 Ways that Acting Alone can be thought of as Social Behavior

2001 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 406-428 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernard Guerin
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Social Behavior ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Research Methods ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The Social ◽  
Body Shapes

This article argues to replace individualistic explanations of behavior with descriptions of social and historical context. Eighteen ways are outlined that playing a guitar alone in a room can be thought of as socially controlled rather than dispositionally controlled. Despite having a skin containing a body, a “person” for the social sciences is a conglomerate of social relationships or interactions that spans space and time. Thinking of people and causes as within a body shapes individualistic biases in our explanations and interventions. Rather than propose a new philosophy, this article reviews 18 concrete ways to begin thinking about people as social interactions and not agentic individuals. This changes the interventions we propose, alters how we view cultural practices, prevents some perennial problems of psychology, and leads the way to integrate psychology in the social sciences. Moving from dispositional explanations to study the historical and social context of social relationships also requires that psychology seriously adapt some of the more intensive research methods from other social sciences.

Rationality and cultural relativism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence H. Simon
Keyword(s):  
Irrational Beliefs ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Cultural Relativism ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
The Social ◽  
Culture Independent ◽  
Symbolic Meanings ◽  
Principle Of Charity ◽  
Lively Debate

Under what conditions may we judge the practices or beliefs of another culture to be rationally deficient? Is it possible that cultures can differ so radically as to embody different and even incommensurable modes of reasoning? Are norms of rationality culturally relative, or are there culture-independent norms of rationality that can be used to judge the beliefs and practices of all human cultures? In order to be in a position to make judgments about the rationality of another culture, we must first understand it. Understanding a very different culture itself raises philosophical difficulties. How do we acquire the initial translation of the language of the culture? Can we use our categories to understand the social practices of another culture, for instance, our categories of science, magic and religion? Or would the mapping of our categories on to the practices of culturally distant societies yield a distorted picture of how they construct social practices and institutions? A lively debate has revolved around these questions. Part of the debate involves clarifying the difficult concepts of rationality and relativism. What sort of judgments of rationality are appropriate? Judgments about how agents’ reasons relate to their actions? Judgments about how well agents’ actions and social practices conform to the norms of their culture? Or judgments about the norms of rationality of cultures as such? Can relativism be given a coherent formulation that preserves the apparent disagreements for which it is meant to account? Can there be incommensurable cultures, such that one culture could not understand the other? According to Donald Davidson’s theory of interpretation, radical translation requires the use of a principle of charity that in effect rules out the possibility of incommensurable cultures. If this result is accepted, then a strong form of cultural relativism concerning norms of rationality is also ruled out. Davidson’s theory, some argue, does not eliminate the possibility of attributing irrational beliefs and practices to agents in other cultures, and thus still leaves some room for debate about how to understand and evaluate such beliefs and practices. Three positions frame the debate. The intellectualist position holds that judgments of rationality are in order across cultures. The symbolist and functionalist positions, here taken together, try to avoid such judgments by attributing functions or symbolic meanings to cultural practices that are generally not understood as such by the agents. The fideist position, wary of too easily being ethnocentric, assumes a more relativist stance with regard to cross-cultural judgments of rationality.

The Anthropology of Literature in France

2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-95
Author(s):  
Laurent Sebastian Fournier ◽  
Jean-Marie Privat
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Symbolic Meanings ◽  
Historical Relationship ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Relationship Of

In this article we present the ongoing theoretical discussions concerning the relations between anthropology and literature in France. We recall the historical relationship of a part of French anthropology and the world of literature. We then try to show how the anthropology of literature began by using the model of the anthropology of art, mainly concentrating on literary works as individual creations specific to the style or the cosmology of a given writer. We explore a new perspective on the analysis of the social and symbolic meanings of literary worlds, putting the emphasis on what is called ‘ethnocriticism’ in France. In order to understand better the influence of literature and literary motives on contemporary cultural practices, and to grasp the relation of literary works with the outside world and with everyday life, we propose to build up a comparative approach of literary works and rituals. Through different novels or other literary works, we address possible developments of contemporary anthropologies of literature in France.

The Snow Angel and Other Imprints

2010 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-124
Author(s):  
Mona Livholts
Keyword(s):  
Research Process ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
Charlotte Perkins Gilman ◽  
Helene Cixous ◽  
Memory Work ◽  
The Social ◽  
Writing Research ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
Symbolic Formation ◽  
Writing Practice

This article, written in the form of an untimely academic novella is a text, which explores academic authoring as thinking and writing practice in a place called Sweden. The aim is on inquiries of geographical space, place, and academia, and the interrelation between the social and symbolic formation of class, gender and whiteness. The novella uses different writing strategies and visual representations such as documentary writing and photographing from the research process, letters to a friend, and memories from childhood, based on three generations of women's lives. The methodology can be described as a critical reflexive writing strategy inspired by poststructuralist and postcolonial feminist theory and literary fiction, and additionally by methodological approaches in the humanities and social sciences, such as theorizing of letters, memory work, and narrative, and autobiographical approaches. In particular, it draws on work by the theorist critic and writer of fiction, Hélène Cixous, and the feminist author and theorist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, drawing on interpretation of Cixous' essay “Enter the Theatre” and Gilman's story “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Characteristics of the untimely academic novella elaborate with possible forms of the symbolic, visual, and performative photographic and sensory in writing research; furthermore, time, social change, and unfinal endings play a pervasive role. It may be read as a story that situates and theorizes embodyment, landscape, and power through the interweaving of forest rural farming spaces and academic office spaces by tracing autobiographical imprints of an untimely feminist author. “The Snow Angel and Other Imprints” is the second article in a trilogy of untimely academic novellas. The first, with the title “The Professor's Chair,” was published in Swedish in 2007 (in the anthology “Genus och det akademiska skrivandets former,” (Eds.) Bränström Öhman & Livholts), and forthcoming in English in the journal Life Writing 2010.

The Social Specificity of Societal Nature Relations in a Flexible Capitalist Society

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis Eversberg
Keyword(s):  
Social Relationships ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Environmental Issues ◽  
Capitalist Society ◽  
Ideal Types ◽  
Mutual Dependency ◽  
The Social ◽  
People’S Perceptions

Based on analyses of a 2016 German survey, this article contributes to debates on ‘societal nature relations’ by investigating the systematic differences between socially specific types of social relations with nature in a flexible capitalist society. It presents a typology of ten different ‘syndromes’ of attitudes toward social and environmental issues, which are then grouped to distinguish between four ideal types of social relationships with nature: dominance, conscious mutual dependency, alienation and contradiction. These are located in Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984) social space to illustrate how social relationships with nature correspond to people’s positions within the totality of social relations. Understanding how people’s perceptions of and actions pertaining to nature are shaped by their positions in these intersecting relations of domination – both within social space and between society and nature – is an important precondition for developing transformative strategies that will be capable of gaining majority support in flexible capitalist societies.

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