Transactions in taste: the collaborative lives of everyday Bengali food Janeja, Manpreet
Publication details: Routledge 2010 New DelhiDescription: xii, 185 pISBN:- 9780415553742
- 394.12095414
Item type | Current library | Collection | Call number | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds | |
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Book | Ahmedabad | Non-fiction | 394.12095414 J2T7 (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | Available | 170780 |
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394 W4G4 The Gift | 394.12 C6E2 An economist gets lunch: new rules for everyday foodies | 394.12 W2P7 The practice of eating | 394.12095414 J2T7 Transactions in taste: the collaborative lives of everyday Bengali food | 394.266309420904 J6C4 Christmas and the British: a modern history | 394.50954 T9E6 Engendering the early household: brahmanical precepts in the early Grhyasutras, middle of the first millenium B.C.E. | 395.52 M6G5 Global dexterity: how to adapt your behavior across cultures without losing yourself in the process |
In a radical departure from previous ethnographies of food, this book asks how and why food is pivotal to social relations and forms of identity that emerge as normal and not normal. It does so by describing the production, consumption, distribution, and disposal of normal Bengali food in middle class households that employ cooks from poor classes, and in Bengali restaurants, in contemporary Calcutta (India) and Dhaka (Bangladesh). In a rare comparative foray into Bengali Hindu and Muslim food-ways on both sides of the border, the book includes addas (idle talk) and interviews with both men and women. It initiates a dialogue that links issues of agency, place, hospitality, and ownership with a new field that places food as an artefact at the centre of its inquiry. It invites the reader throughout to approach food afresh, as the key that unlocks the complexities of what is mundane yet profound the everyday. The book thus analyses the constant and fraught negotiations that feed into definitions of normality, class and identity in the deeply intimate yet intensely public domain of food. Food transactions here provide a window into shifting configurations of trust, power, and conflict integral to social relationships, shaped by events such as the 194344 Bengal famine, the 1947 partition of India, and the 1971 Bangladesh War.
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