Introduction & The Sacred Life of Plants: Placing Royal Growth

Weiss explores the dynamic relation of specific local, regional, and global understandings of value as manifested in the coffee of rural Haya communities. His investigation offers critical insight into the significance of colonial and postcolonial encounters in this region of Africa.https://scholarworks.wm.edu/asbookchapters/1124/thumbnail.jp

“Life-changing bacon”: transgression as desire in contemporary American tastes

This essay considers how Americans attribute moral qualities to pigs and pork. I explore the ways that producers and consumers of pasture-raised pigs understand their interests in—and especially appetite for—pork in terms of moral values. At once a source of economic distinction, ecological commitment, and culinary indulgence, the pork from pasture-raised (or “heritage breed”, or “outdoor raised”) pigs is, in many ways, simultaneously a contemporary icon of excess and restraint. This convergence of contrasting values is even more amplified in bacon, the now ubiquitous food, flavor, and substance that is, for many, the quintessence of pork. This contemporary American infatuation with all-things bacon is an expression of both an enduring history of moralization (long associated with pigs and pork); as well as a very specific conjuncture of political economic and sociological forces. The longue durée and the current moment combine to put bacon on our plates with the distinctive pride of place it now enjoys. In this paper I suggest that the implications of this contemporary American taste for bacon, and the ways this taste have informed a consuming public knowledgeable about and desirous of this pork product, embody wider changes in American food politics and values

Eating Ursula

This paper examines issues surrounding the values of farmers, consumers, chefs, and other food activists who are working to expand the production and consumption of pastured pork in central North Carolina (a region known as the Piedmont). What I try to demonstrate in this paper are the ways that an ‘‘ethics of care’’ (Heath and Meneley 2010) is often articulated in terms of the cultural categories of ‘‘connection’’ and ‘‘authenticity.’’ These consciously expressed categories are shown to undergird a range of commitments, from concerns about animal welfare, to support for ‘‘local’’ economies, to parental care for children. My discussion considers the relationships among the lives of animals and the meat they yield, as well as the craft that brings about that transformation, and shows how the ethical questions embedded in these relationships and processes depend upon a wider set of cultural practices and values that are pressing concerns in our larger economy and society. I further consider how examining everyday understandings of ‘‘connection’’ and ‘‘authenticity,’’ as revealed in ethnographic work with farmers, consumers, restaurateurs, and other food activists in the Piedmont, can highlight certain tensions within this ‘‘ethics of care’’—such as tensions about food taboos and certification processes—that speak to the politics of food activism in the region and elsewhere

Chronic Mobb Asks a Blessing: Apocalyptic Hip-Hop in a Time of Crisis

Child laborers in South Asia, child soldiers in Sierra Leone and Uganda, Chinese youth playing computer games to earn virtual gold, youth involved in sex trafficking in the former Soviet republics and Thailand: these are just some of the young people featured in the news of late. The idea that young people are more malleable and the truisms that youth are the future or children are our hope for the future give news stories and scholarly accounts added meaning. To address how and why youth and children have come to seem so important to globalization, the contributors to this book look at the both the spatial relations and the temporal dimensions of globalization in places as far apart as Oakland, California, and Tamatave, Madagascar, in situations as disparate as the idealization of childhood innocence and the brutal lives of street children. Discourses of, and practices by, youth and children, from the design of toys to political mobilization, are critical sites through which people everywhere conceive of, produce, contest, and naturalize the new futures.https://scholarworks.wm.edu/asbookchapters/1066/thumbnail.jp

On the Evanescent and Reminiscent

In classic accounts, taste is dismissed as a “proximal sense,” too brutish to admit of refinement; and yet the term “taste” is also a synecdoche of aesthetic judgment itself. These contrasts inform this paper, which illustrates their expression in ethnographic particulars drawn from my research on pasture-raised pork in North Carolina. My intention is not to demonstrate what taste really is, but to ask how the multidimensionality of taste is realized in practice. This inquiry might further illuminate the connection between human perception and systems of value

Dressing at Death: Haya Adornment and Temporality

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Northwestern Tanzania on a Single Shilling: Sociality, Embodiment, Valuation

The process of fermenting banana juice and ground millet into banana beer is an elaborate craft, practiced and appreciated by Haya men. As is the case in many African communities where the plenitude and desirability of beer is intimately connected with, if not indistinguishable from, the establishment and vigor of sociality itself, Haya brewers and drinkers are scrupulously attentive to the details of this often lengthy procedure (Carlson 1989; Karp 1980; Taylor 1991).\u27 Many told me of their concern that jealous neighbors or sorcerers (often one and the same in Haya neighborhoods) would spoil their efforts by pouring kerosene into the frothy mixture during the night. But Haya evaluations of the fine points of the brewing process are by no means limited to anxious attempts to safeguard their valuable libations; there is, in fact, what can best be described as an aesthetic of beer production, and it is the demands of this aesthetic that dictate a careful and precise techniqu