chap 8 13/8/04 4:24 pm Page 176 8 The political morality of food: discourses, contestation and alternative consumption Roberta Sassatelli Anthropology and sociology have been keen to show that consumption is a social and moral field, and that consumer practices are part of an ongoing process of negotiation of social classifications and hierarchies. Food consumption in particular has been associated with symbolically mediated notions of order (Douglas and Isherwood 1979). We know that particular foods are identified with annual festivities, set apart for
; and calling out the manipulation of humanitarian action ( Redfield, 2006 ). It is also a value signifier, capturing notions of humanity and solidarity, fired by a freewheeling spirit that cuts across borders and is unrestrained by the trappings of state power. It has also been conceptualised as a site where science meets morality, reconciling individual narrative testimony of suffering with objective epidemiological data ( Redfield, 2006 ). Témoignage as such is
limited to operating in countries under Western tutelage, but even those inspired by anti-communism were cautious about structural integration into Western security strategies. At the beginning of the 1990s, NGOs shrugged off their scepticism for the morality of state power, working more closely with Western military forces. Private and government funding for humanitarian operations increased. With the help of news media, humanitarian agencies boosted their political capital, presenting themselves as providers of public moral conscience for the
of the Three Universes of EU Border Control: Military/Navy–border guards/police–database analysts ’, Security Dialogue , 45 : 3 , 209 – 25 . Boltanski , L. ( 1999 ), Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics ( Cambridge : Cambridge University Press
), Humanitarian Ethics: A Guide to the Morality of Aid in War and Disaster ( New York : Oxford University Press ). Slim , H. ( 2015b ), ‘ Wonderful Work: Globalizing the Ethics of Humanitarian Action ’, in MacGinty , R. and Peterson , J. H. (eds), The Routledge
might say). For example, the Declaration of St. Petersburg (1868) prohibited explosive munitions for being ‘excessively cruel’. But they were still permitted for big-game hunting and colonial wars. Gustave Moynier, co-founder and first president of the Red Cross (a position he held for thirty-six years), theorised about this distinction in the language of the time, writing that the organisation’s founding principles were the product of evangelical morality and civilisation
, the focus of this paper is late-capitalism’s absorption and reproduction of the informal economies of the global South, especially the role of post-humanitarianism in governing global precarity. The question of social reproduction is important here. Encompassing the reproduction of human beings as a biological species, social reproduction is an organic part of capitalism. It includes birthing and caring for the young, sick and old while maintaining family, friendship and wider community linkages, identities and moralities ( Fraser, 2016
. W. ( 2006 ), ‘ Humanitarian Principles, Private Military Agents: Implications of the Private Military Industry for the Humanitarian Community ’, Brown Journal of World Affairs , 13 : 1 , 105 – 22 . Slim , H. ( 2015 ), Humanitarian Ethics: A Guide to the Morality of Aid in War and Disaster . London
), ‘ Relief Agencies and Moral Standing in War: Principles of Humanity, Neutrality, Impartiality and Solidarity ’, Development in Practice , 7 , 342 – 52 . Slim , H. ( 2015 ), Humanitarian Ethics: A Guide to the Morality of Aid in War and Disaster ( Oxford : Oxford University Press
This collection and the romances it investigates are crucial to our understanding of the aesthetics of medieval narrative and to the ideologies of gender and sexuality, race, religion, political formations, social class, ethics, morality and national identity with which those narratives emerge.