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
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 West. A new political economy of humanitarian aid developed
some more than others, as Orwell 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 humanitarian ideal was therefore ‘inaccessible to savage
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 ). Traditionally unpaid and cast as women’s work, although men have always done some, without these taken
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 : Hurst . Slim , H. and Bonwick , A. ( 2005 ), Protection: An ALNAP Guide for Humanitarian Agencies . London : Active Learning Network for Accountability/Overseas Development Initiative . Soussan , J. ( 2016 ), ‘ Qabassin, Syria: Security Issues and Practices in an MSF Mission in the Land of Jihad ’, in Neuman , M. and Weissman , F. (eds), Saving Lives and Staying Alive: Humanitarian Security in the
This book explores the new applications of established theories or adapts theoretical approaches in order to illuminate behaviour in the field of food. It focuses on social processes at the downstream end of the food chain, processes of distribution and consumption. The book reviews the existing disciplinary approaches to understanding judgements about food taste. It suggests that the quality 'halal' is the result of a social and economic consensus between the different generations and cultures of migrant Muslims as distinct from the non-Muslim majority. Food quality is to be viewed in terms of emergent cognitive paradigms sustained within food product networks that encompass a wide range of social actors with a wide variety of intermediaries, professional and governmental. The creation of the Food Standards Agency (FSA) and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) occurred at a juncture when perceptions of policy failure were acknowledged at United Kingdom and European Union governmental levels. The book presents a case study of retailer-led food governance in the UK to examine how different 'quality logics' actually collide in the competitive world of food consumption and production. It argues that concerns around food safety were provoked by the emergence of a new food aesthetic based on 'relationalism' and 'embeddedness'. The book also argues that the study of the arguments and discourses deployed to criticise or otherwise qualify consumption is important to the political morality of consumption.
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.
In 1997, Stuart Clark published the first monograph since the time of Jules Michelet to focus on pre-modern ideas about witches. The language of belief in witchcraft studies betrays an anachronistic, modernist and dismissive approach to a mental universe quite different from our own. This book makes the male witch visible, to construct him as a historical subject, as a first step toward a deeper understanding of the functions and role of gender in pre-modern European witch-hunting and ideas about witches. The overtly political dimension to the study of witches in early modern Europe demands a high level of consciousness and reflexivity regarding language, representation, and meaning. William Monter provides a wealth of data about male witches, in an 'unremarkable province' close to 'the heart of northern and western Europe'. Here, men comprised the majority of those tried and executed for witchcraft. The book examines cases in which men were accused of witchcraft. The examples are drawn from several different regions, in order to test conventional generalisations about male witches. The agency theory posits that actors always have choices; 'agent-centred' morality proposes a novel twist on both traditional Kantian internalist categories. The problems of both male and female witches' agency and selfhood are discussed. The book also presents data compiled from ten canonical works, and a brief discussion of demonological illustrations. Finally, it addresses the question of what it means to label a man as a witch within a framework that explicitly and implicitly feminised witchcraft.
closure or demolition of a specific cinema, as many are stand-alone items. The memories that emerge in the letters and articles that I examine cover four main themes: identity, community, morality and decline. While there is necessarily some overlap between them, this chapter will examine these four areas in order to draw out their significance in terms of the process of framing memory in cultural terms
-war British society, but also in the grey area between two sets of competing and unresolved moralities. On the one hand, it has a liberal and progressive agenda, depicting criminality sympathetically, attempting to present a realistic and unsentimental view of contemporary Britain, and critical of the suffering imposed on young girls by society’s attempt to preserve respectability at all costs. One of the more
