Urban Foodways and Communication

Ethnographic Studies in Intangible Cultural Food Heritages Around the World

Edited by Casey Man Kong Lum, Marc de Ferrière le Vayer

Publication date:

19 May 2016

Length of book:

248 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

ISBN-13: 9781442266421

Embedded in the quest for ways to preserve and promote heritage of any kind and, in particular, food heritage, is an appreciation or a sense of an impending loss of a particular way of life – knowledge, skills set, traditions -- deemed vital to the survival of a culture or community. Foodways places the production, procurement, preparation and sharing or consumption of food at an intersection among culture, tradition, and history. Thus, foodways is an important material and symbolic marker of identity, race and ethnicity, gender, class, ideology and social relations.

Urban Foodways and Communication seeks to enrich our understanding of unique foodways in urban settings around the world as forms of intangible cultural heritage. Each ethnographic case study focuses its analysis on how the featured foodways manifests itself symbolically through and in communication. The book helps advance our knowledge of urban food heritages in order to contribute to their appreciation, preservation, and promotion.

1: At the Intersection of Urban Foodways, Communication, and Intangible Cultural Heritage: An Introduction
Casey Man Kong Lum and Marc de Ferrière le Vayer
2: Bacalhau–A Love Story: An Ethnographic Study of Portuguese Foodways
paula arvela
3: Kimchi Nation: Constructing Kimjang as an Intangible Korean Heritage
Chi-Hoon Kim
4: The Lebanese Bigarade: A Tree at the Heart of Urban Foodways
Aïda Kanafani-Zahar
5: Shark Town: Kesennuma’s Taste for Shark and the Challenge of a Tsunami
Jun Akamine
6: The Story in My Matzah Ball Soup: Food as Memory, Identity, and Culture in Contemporary Jewish Barcelona
Catherine Simone Gallin
7: Gastronomic Festivals and Celebrations on the Montenegrin Coast: Promoting Multicultural Heritage
through Traditional Foodways
Ivona Jovanovic´, Andiela Vitić-Ćetković, and Charles A. Baker-Clark
8: FIFA vs. As Baianas de Acarajé and the Politics of the Cultural Imaginary
Scott Alves Barton
9: Edible Heritage: Tradition, Health, and Ephemeral Consumption Spaces in Mexican Street Food
José Antonio Vázquez-Medina, Miriam Bertrán, and F. Xavier Medina
10: Botteghe Storiche: A Study of the Disappearance of Historic Food Shops and Its Role in the Transformation of Rome’s Urban Social Life
Sonia Massari, Elena T. Carbone, and Salem Paulos
11: Urban Melting Pot: Food Heritage in Yakutia
Isabelle Bianquis and Isabella Borissova
12: Epilogue: Urban Foodways as Communication and as Intangible Cultural Heritage
Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz

Lum, de Ferrière le Vayer, and their collaborating authors provide an exciting new perspective on foodways as dynamic forms of communication within and among contested urban spaces. Sophisticated yet accessible, diverse yet coherent, fresh but well grounded, this volume dives deep into the material, symbolic, and political complexities of food as cultural heritage.