Cuisine and Symbolic Capital

Food in Film and Literature

Edited By: Cheleen Mahar

£39.99

This collection of essays examines food in international film and literature, exploring how making, eating, and thinking about food reveals culture, mediates social relationships, and shapes cultural identity.

This collection of interdisciplinary essays examines food as it mediates social relationships and self-presentation in a variety of international films and literature. Authors explore the…

This collection of interdisciplinary essays examines food as it mediates social relationships and self-presentation in a variety of international films and literature. Authors explore the ways that making, eating and thinking about food reveals culture. In doing so the essays highlight how food and foodways become a type of symbolic capital, which influences the larger concern of cultural identity. Essays are organized into three central themes: Culinary Translations of Identity: From Britain to China; Food as Metaphor in Contemporary German Writing; and Love, Feasting and the Symbolic Power of Food in French Writing. Each essay investigates the uses of food as a way to apprehend cultural meaning. The essays presented provide theoretical templates for the study of food in a wide range of international film and literature,

Cheleen Ann-Catherine Mahar is Professor of Anthropology and Chair of International Studies at Pacific University Oregon. She is co-editor of An Introduction to the Work of Pierre Bourdieu (Macmillan, 1990, St. Martin’s Press 1990), and publishes in the fields of social theory and migration. The University of Texas Press recently published her book, Reinventing Practice in a Disenchanted World: Bourdieu and Urban Poverty in Oaxaca, Mexico. Currently she is writing in the area of food as symbolic capital as it pertains to British Colonial migrants to New Zealand.