Nir Avieli's Books

Food and Power

A Culinary Ethnography of Israel

By: Nir Avieli

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Food and Power

A Culinary Ethnography of Israel

By: Nir Avieli

Drawing on ethnography conducted in Israel since the late 1990s, Food and Power considers how power is produced, reproduced, negotiated, and subverted in the contemporary Israeli culinary sphere. Nir Avieli explores issues such as the definition of Israeli cuisine, the ownership of hummus, the privatization of communal Kibbutz dining rooms, and food at a military prison for Palestinian detainees to show how cooking and eating create ambivalence concerning questions of strength and weakness and how power and victimization are mixed into a sense of self-justification that maintains internal cohesion among Israeli Jews.

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Page Count

292

Publisher

Univ of California Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0520290097

ISBN 13

9780520290099

Rice Talks

Food & Community in a Vietnamese Town

By: Nir Avieli

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Rice Talks

Food & Community in a Vietnamese Town

By: Nir Avieli

An anthropological study of the culture surrounding food in a thriving Vietnamese town. Rice Talks explores the importance of cooking and eating in the everyday social life of Hoi An, a prosperous market town in central Vietnam known for its exceptionally elaborate and sophisticated local cuisine. In a vivid and highly personal account, Nir Avieli takes the reader from the private setting of the extended family meal into the public realm of the festive, extraordinary, and unique. He shows how foodways relate to class relations, gender roles, religious practices, cosmology, ethnicity, and even local and national politics. This evocative study departs from conventional anthropological research on food by stressing the rich meanings, generative capacities, and potential subversion embedded in foodways and eating. “In this very engaging narrative Avieli captures the flavor and richness of everyday lowland Vietnamese life, as well as the trials and tribulations of attempting to eke out a livelihood, fit within family hierarchical structures, and correctly pay homage to the necessary deities and ancestors.” —Sarah Turner, McGill University “Readers with an interest in Vietnamese, Southeast Asian, and Asian cuisines and/or the influences of colonialism on local foodways will find the work useful. . . . Filled with descriptions of meals and dishes likely to get the culinarily-minded reader drooling. And almost any non-academic writer planning to do food-related research anywhere in the world could take something away from the final chapter, which discusses the practicalities of this type of research.” —Robyn Eckhardt, author of EatingAsia

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