Partaking with the divine and symbolizing the societal: The semiotics of Japanese food and drink

Loveday, Leo; Chiba, Satomi

doi:10.1515/semi.1985.56.1-2.115

Cited by 8 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…Japanese norms require of men, whose eating preferences deviate from gender expectations in this regard, that they excuse their behaviour by referring to a sweet tooth (amato) or a sweet mouth (amakuchi) (Loveday & Chiba, 1985).…”

Section: Preferences For Speci®c Foodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The former pattern is exempli®ed in Japan, where a wife's rice-bowl and chopsticks are a smaller size than those of her husband (Loveday & Chiba, 1985), while the latter pattern is reported as occurring in many traditional, agricultural societies (see for example : Brown, 1987). The quantity of food consumed tends to be popularly regarded as a matter that is selfregulated by adults in Western cultures.…”

Section: Food Quantitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Preferences, quantities and concerns: socio-cultural perspectives on the gendered consumption of foods

Jensen¹,

Holm²

1999

Eur J Clin Nutr

184

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A review of the sociological research regarding the gendered features of food consumption is presented. The focus is upon differences between women and men in regard to their preferences for particular foods and types of meals, seen in relation to the cultural function of foods as symbolic markers of femininity or masculinity, assessments of the quantities of food consumed by women and men respectively, and differences between women and men in regard to concerns with food safety, health, weight reduction and ®tness. Some methodological limitations of this research are discussed with particular reference to the need for interdisciplinary cooperation between sociologists and nutritionists in the design and analysis of dietary surveys. Suggestions are made in regard to future directions for sociological research in this ®eld, with particular reference to the issue that dietary recommendations appear to focus upon increasing the consumption of foods that are markers of femininity and decreasing the consumption of foods that are markers of masculinity in Western food culture. Sponsorship: This research was supported by The National Food Agency, Denmark.

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Section: Preferences For Speci®c Foodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Food Quantitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Preferences, quantities and concerns: socio-cultural perspectives on the gendered consumption of foods

Jensen¹,

Holm²

1999

Eur J Clin Nutr

184

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“…Fieldhouse (1995) defines recipes as being encoded forms of cultural knowledge wherein the status of the holder is congruent with the recipe's complexity and investment of time in preparation. Similarly, Loveday and Chiba (1985) explored the potential of food as signalling cultural meanings in the sacred and the everyday world of Japanese society. Unlike many familiar cultural rituals that terminate in the participants feasting, such as Christmas and Thanksgiving, Songkran foods are offered as alms to monks and to deceased ancestors, with the leftovers given to family and neighbours.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…By teaching younger women in the household the traditional values, morals, and food customs are passed on from one generation to the next (Limanonda). The ritualistic nature of the events may mean they function as rites of passage for women as they move into old age (Loveday & Chiba, 1985;Moore, 1996).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Offerings: Food Traditions of Older Thai Women at Songkran

Clair¹,

Bunrayong

Vittayakorn

et al. 2004

Journal of Occupational Science

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It is deep within our hearts that we have to do this." Such words reflect the potency of subjective and social meaning of food occupations for older Thai women at Songkran, the traditional Thai New Year. This paper presents the Thai findings from a multi-site research project exploring older women's experiences of food occupations at Songkran in Chiang Mai, Thailand; and Christmas in Auckland, New Zealand, and Kentucky, USA. Narrative data for this study were collected through focus group interviews with 33 Thai women aged 60 years or over as the women talked about planning, preparing, and offering food at Songkran. The women's stories reveal the centrality of carrying on ritualistic food traditions in Chiang Mai society. They must know and follow the ancient ways and recipes taught by mothers and grandmothers as they prepare themselves and the foods for going to the temple where they offer food to the monks and their deceased ancestors. Happiness comes from earning merit, doing the jobs themselves and knowing they contribute to a good and generous Thai society. Their ways are the traditional ways. Doing and passing on food occupations to their daughters and granddaughters will "serve the good traditions forever." The findings from this study contribute to the occupational science literature through documenting food occupations and their meanings for older women within one cultural group. The multi-site nature of the project contributes to understandings of occupation that transcend cultural boundaries.

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“…He does, however, leave himself vulnerable to the charge of ethnocentric utilitarianism that is commonly levied against formal exchange theorists. Such a concern has led others to focus on more ernie accounts of the sociable habits of everyday life, including drinking (150,174,260), eating (158), bathing (46), cheating (186), and the especially suggestive essay by Hendry (106) on wrapping.…”

Section: Social Analyses: Holism and Its Challengesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Directions in the Anthropology of Contemporary Japan

Kelly¹

1991

Annu. Rev. Anthropol.

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independent data for the construction and verification of theory, is in fact a very com plicated compound of local realities and the contingencies of metropolitan theory (5:360).A third front has recently been opened in the assault on the edifice of ethnography. Having deconstructed ethnographic form and historicized the ethnographic subject, some have now turned to regionalizing its conceptual claims. Their presumption is that all ethnography is regional, a local transposition of general disciplinary concerns. It must be read critically for the problems it highlights through the mutual adaptation of anthropological dis course and locally prominent features and issues: prestige economy in Melanesia, marriage rules in Australia, lineage in Africa, caste in South Asia. "Localizing strategies" is Fardon's felicitous phrase (81) for the complicated dialectic of region and problematic, which was illustrated so effectively in Abu-Lughod's review (2) of "zones of theory" in Arab world anthropology.Some of the work I consider in this essay may be so analyzed. I Yet I argue IThis review is limited to social-cultural anthropology (for archaeology, see 77, 109; for linguistic anthropology, see 244; for primatology, see 9, 97:244--58). I deal only with English language works. The disciplinary surveys in the periodic but misnamed Introductory Bibliogra phy for Japanese Studies provide helpful English-language reviews of anthropology in Japan (114,197, 261,262,288,289; see also 17,124, 183, and 157). Long (157) has surveyed family sociology. 395

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Partaking with the divine and symbolizing the societal: The semiotics of Japanese food and drink

Cited by 8 publications

References 0 publications

Preferences, quantities and concerns: socio-cultural perspectives on the gendered consumption of foods

Preferences, quantities and concerns: socio-cultural perspectives on the gendered consumption of foods

Offerings: Food Traditions of Older Thai Women at Songkran

Directions in the Anthropology of Contemporary Japan

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