Interdisciplinarity, food, and power

Abstract

Christine Wilson’s (2002) narrative about becoming anutritional anthropologist is a window into the developmentof interdisciplinary food studies in the social and naturalsciences. Wilson’s career has been as multi-stranded as nutri-tional anthropology. She wove together business skills, edi-torial experience, fascination with biology, nutritional surveymethodology, and anthropological fieldwork in Malaya toforge a pioneering path into the now widely-known field ofnutritional anthropology. She collaborated with a number ofprofessionals in diverse fields including nutrition, para-sitology, medicine, anthropology, and public health. Hergoal was to discover the reasons for and consequences ofpeople’s eating habits. Wilson’s paper and experience affirmthe benefits of interdisciplinary approaches in food studies.Parallel to Wilson’s narrative of her own professionaltrajectory is her description of some developments in appliednutritional anthropology. She aptly points out both the ori-ginality of Margaret Mead’s early work (1943) and the sig-nificance of government sponsorship of food habits research,especially of war-related research on how to convince soldiersand civilians to change their diets and eat unfamiliar foodsin response to war-time shortages. Later applied researchaimed to understand and mitigate nutrition-related diseasesbylinkingeatinghabits,dietarynutrition,andhealth.Overall,Wilson’s paper underscores the value of anthropologicalcollaboration with biological sciences in the study of humanfood behaviour.Interdisciplinarity within the social sciences has also beenfundamental to advances in nutritional anthropology andfood and culture studies, particularly in understanding howpower affects eating habits. In studying eating disorders, forexample, anthropologists have drawn on the work of his-torians, psychologists, sociologists, and women’s studiesscholars to study how power relations affect women’s fast-ing and beliefs about food in diverse cultural settings. Afeminist perspective motivated my inquiry into why con-temporaryWesternwomenarestarvingthemselves,sometimesto death. I compared the research of three historians (Bell,1985;Bynum,1987;Brumberg,1988)onwomen’sfastingoverseven centuries with anthropologists’ cross-cultural data onfasting and psychologists’ studies of modern eating disordersto show the cultural peculiarity of contemporary Westernwomen’s eating problems and their grounding in Westerncultural dualism and patriarchy (Counihan, 1999). Nichter’s(2000) recent interdisciplinary research on girls and foodcombined data from interviews, questionnaires and focusgroups with scholarship from sociology, nutrition, and psy-chology to show girls’ continuing struggles to maintain apositive relationship to food and body. Grounding the anth-ropological study of eating disorders in interdisciplinaryperspectives reveals that modern U.S. women’s relation tofood is historically specific, can be changed, and can beempowering rather than oppressive.Anthropological studies of foodways have also used inter-disciplinary perspectives to study power relations betweenclasses, races and nations. For example, Mintz (1985) com-bined anthropology and history to study the world-widecommodification of sugar effected through European inva-sion of the Caribbean, land seizure, and enslavement ofAfricans to produce exorbitant profits. Glasser (1988) com-bined social work, political economy, and ethnography todocument the structure, ideology, and clientele of an urbansoup kitchen. She described the cultural context of thepoverty and social alienation that drove people to the soupkitchen and designed a series of classes to enable clients tobemoreeffectivesocialactors.Fink(1998)combinedfeministand political-economic approaches with participant obser-vation and interviews to study class, race, and gender rela-tions in a pork-processing plant in rural Iowa. Attention tothe different experiences in the meatpacking industry ofmale and female, immigrant and native-born, and black,white and Latino workers enabled a richer and more criticalunderstanding of the inequalities inherent in the industry.The study of McDonald’s in East Asia by Watson (1997) andhiscollaboratorscombinedethnographic,economic,andpoli-tical perspectives to study the globalization of food and itseffects on local cultures and diets.As Christine Wilson’s article and career demonstrate,anthropologists studying foodways in the future will benefitfrom vibrant interdisciplinary connections. The insights con-tributed by historical, political, economic, and women’sE-mail: carole.counihan@millersville.edu studies perspectives will continue to sharpen anthropologists’0195–6663/02/010073+02 $35.00/0 # 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd