Introduction to Foodways and Global Anthropology Practice Flashcards

Flashcards covering key terms from anthropology lectures on foodways, racialization, urban spatial practices, nationalism, migration, and multi-species ethnography.

Food Desert

A term Ashante Reese argues is inadequate because it implies food access inequities happened by chance, obscuring the history of corporate disinvestment in Black neighborhoods.

Geographies of Self-reliance

Systems and foodways that are self-established and maintained by communities, such as gardens, hucksters, and local grocers that take credit.

Small Grocers

Businesses characterized by cooperative buying and the extension of credit, which were the basis of food security in Deanwood before corporate expansion.

Culinary Triangle

A concept by Claude Levi-Strauss suggesting that most cultures categorize foodstuff into three phases—raw, cooked, and rotten—and that these categories are cultural interpretations.

Matter Out of Place

A concept suggesting that what is considered clean or unclean within cultures is incredibly subjective.

Nothingness

A term used by residents in food access studies to describe the lack of supermarkets as a manifestation of systemic inequities shaping the lives of Black urban residents.

Productive Nostalgia

A process in which nostalgia is not merely memory or imagination but calls for the embodiment and enactment of practice.

Racism as a Relational Concept

A set of practices, structures, beliefs, and representations that transforms perceived differences into inequality.

Difference

Notions of race based on perceived variations rather than biological facts, often used in race science to categorize groups as inherently lesser.

Moral Economy

Economic activities shaped by cultural norms, values, and obligations that exist beyond traditional market transactions.

Black Economy

A system where community members find security and liberation in entrepreneurship, viewing Black-owned businesses as essential for community success.

In vs. Of the City

Anthropological distinctions where 'In' treats the city as a site of research (micro focus), and 'Of' treats the city as the object of multi-scalar analysis (Urbanism).

Spatial Practices

The concept that space is socially produced, contested, and can transform the social conditions of the sites where they intervene.

Fortified Enclaves

Gated communities that isolate residents and reinforce social inequality by contributing to urban segregation.

Partition

The $1947$ division of India from Bengal to Punjab under British colonial rule, resulting in one of history's largest forced migrations and over $1$ million deaths.

Imagine Otherwise

The idea that border designs embed political imaginaries and offer locations to envision peace or different versions of history, such as the Wagah border post.

Imagined Communities

A concept by Benedict Anderson depicting a nation as a socially constructed community imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.

Invented Traditions

Relatively recent practices presented as traditional that seek to inculcate values by repetition and establish a connection to a historic past.

Sect

A subgroup of a religious or political belief system that Lara Deeb describes as 'meaningful and meaningless,' functioning as an empty box people fill with connotations.

Culture of Refusal

The act of rejecting certain affiliations, identities, or relationships to claim sociality and stake political projects, such as refusing parents' ideas about religious sects.

Use Wear

Modifications made to migrant goods, analyzed by Jason De Leon, providing evidence of border-crossing body techniques and corporeal suffering.

Migration-specific Habitus

A unique form of habitus where working-class border crossers are socialized to tolerate abnormal levels of misery and death as a matter of course.

Transnationalism

The phenomenon where individuals and groups maintain social, cultural, and economic ties across national borders, identifying with more than one nationality.

De Facto State

A political entity, like Abkhazia, that functions like a state and controls territory but lacks full international recognition.

Continent Homes

Homes that persist across displacement and conflict through emotional attachment and memory, even when damaged or incomplete.

Site to Mourn

A place where grief is made socially meaningful, often depending on family practices and local truths rather than just forensic identification.

Recognition and Denial

The tension between the official acknowledgment of identity or political status and the refusal to acknowledge facts, violence, or legitimacy.

Objects of Absence

Belongings, photographs, and documents of missing people that circulate among relatives, keeping the absence of the person socially active.

Refugeedom

The social condition of being a refugee in everyday life, characterized by dependency, uncertainty, and limited mobility.

Humanitarianism

A moral and political system through which aid is distributed based on who is recognized as vulnerable or needing help.

Inhospitable Zone

A place, such as Baghdad in summer, made dangerous for life due to the intersection of environmental heat, political neglect, and broken infrastructure.

Fragility of Infrastructure

The weakness of systems like power grids and water networks, which becomes exposed under environmental stress like climate-change-driven heat.

More-than Human Relations

Ecological and social relationships that include animals, plants, and insects as active participants in shaping human movement and political life.

Multi-species Ethnography

An anthropological approach that studies human life together with nonhuman beings and their shared environments.

Companion Species

Species, such as the monarch butterfly, that live alongside humans in ways that show how migration, agriculture, and ecology are intertwined.