Description
Book SynopsisAre we what we eat? What does food reveal about how we live and how we think of ourselves in relation to others? And why do people have a strong attachment to their own cuisine and an aversion to the foodways of others? This title examines how people use the metaphor of a principal food in conceptualizing themselves in relation to other people.
Trade ReviewHonorable Mention for the 1993 Award for Best Professional/Scholarly Book in Sociology and Anthropology, Association of American Publishers "As in [Ohnuki-Tierney's] Monkey as Mirror, where she follows her metaphor deep into the prejudices of Japanese society, so she here finds that rice has been given a major role in historical formulation of the idea of self... Beautifully, even elegantly, presented... An important volume which traces this chosen means of identity and makes understandable the various anomalies that it would seem to have occasioned."--Donald Richie, The Japan Times "An important and timely book on the Japanese sense of self and the link to the sacredness of rice agriculture."--Drew Gerstle, The Times Higher Education Supplement
Table of Contents*Frontmatter, pg. i*Contents, pg. vii*Acknowledgments, pg. ix*A Note to the Reader, pg. xii*One. Food as a Metaphor of Self: An Exercise in Historical Anthropology, pg. 1*Two. Rice and Rice Agriculture Today, pg. 12*Three. Rice as a Staple Food?, pg. 30*Four. Rice in Cosmogony and Cosmology CLEARLY,, pg. 44*Five. Rice as Wealth, Power, and Aesthetics, pg. 63*Six. Rice as Self, Rice Paddies as Our Land, pg. 81*Seven. Rice in the Discourse of Selves and Others, pg. 99*Eight. Foods as Selves and Others in Cross-cultural Perspective, pg. 114*Nine. Symbolic Practice through Time: Self, Ethnicity, and Nationalism, pg. 127*Notes, pg. 137*References Cited, pg. 149*Index, pg. 171
