Mentinis The Psychopolitics of Food

Culinary rites of passage in the neoliberal age
Erscheinungsjahr 2016
ISBN: 978-1-317-29478-8
Verlag: CRC Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 134 Seiten

Reihe: Concepts for Critical Psychology

The Psychopolitics of Food probes into the contemporary ‘foodscape’, examining culinary practices and food habits and in particular the ways in which they conflate with neoliberal political economy. It suggests that generic alimentary and culinary practices constitute technologies of the self and the body and argues that the contemporary preoccupation with food takes the form of ‘rites of passage’ that express and mark the transition from a specific stage of neoliberal development to another vis-a-vis a reconfiguration of the alimentary and sexual regimes.

Even though these rites of passage are taking place on the borders of cultural bi-polarities, their function, nevertheless, is precisely to define these borders as sites of a neoliberal transitional demand; that is, to produce a cultural bifurcation between ‘eating orders’ and ‘eating dis-orders’, by promoting and naturalising certain social logics while simultaneously rendering others as abject and anachronistic.

Based on the idea of the culinary/alimentary rites of passage, the approach of the book is interdisciplinary, drawing as it does on several theoretical resources from anthropology and sociology to psychoanalysis and critical psychology, in addition to being methodologically pluralistic. The book is a worthwhile read for researchers and advanced scholars in the areas of food studies, critical psychology, anthropology and sociology.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mentinis, Mihalis

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein
• Sozialwissenschaften Psychologie Allgemeine Psychologie Sozialpsychologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements

Preface

Dedication

Table of contents

Introduction: Culinary Rites of Passage in the Neoliberal Age

Chapter 1: From Unemployment to ‘Creative’ Adaptability: Romanticised Chefs and the Psychopolitics of Gastroporn

Chapter 2: From the Semiotic to the Symbolic: Placentophagy and the Name-of- the-Chef

Chapter 3: From Colonialism to Neoliberal Multiculturalism: A Mapuche Spice in the Chilean National Cuisine

Chapter 4: From East to West: Economic Crisis and the Cooking of the New Greeks

Chapter 5: From Eating to Starving: Gastrosexual Men and Anorectic Women

Conclusion: Towards a Theory of Anorectic Cannibalism

References

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Mihalis Mentinis completed this work as part of a postdoctoral research project at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. He now lives and works in Athens, Greece.