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Attacking the backlog. Sidney W. Mintz, Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past: Mintz is the author of Sweetness and Power, a book ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
misterrivkat highly recommends for its exploration of the links between desire for good-tasting foods and colonialism. This is a collection of essays, and I don't think it's a great place to start, in part because Mintz is doing a lot of speculation and not offering much evidence about, say, the role of food in slave communities. He also goes off at the end, denying that America has a cuisine because, he insists, a cuisine requires repeated exposure to particular foods, such that the possessors of the cuisine have active opinions about what it should be like. But I have opinions about what pizza and burritos should be like and I eat them all the time; what I don't do, and what Mintz seems covertly to assume is required for a cuisine, is cook them. (As misterrivkat points out, I don't cook anything.) If individual household preparation is required for his definition of a cuisine, he should say so and defend that (which would require saying something about gender, because I don't know why Italian men should in general get to claim access to a cuisine just because they're nearby when the women prepare the food). Instead he just expresses bemusement about why many Americans to whom he talks reject his "America has no cuisine" position.
George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By: This book is relatively old and short; Lakoff & Johnson begin the project of defining and exploring metaphors that structure our thought. A lot of it is conceptual and English-focused, and I didn't get much out of the detailed investigations into various metaphors like "time is money." Women, Fire and Dangerous Things would be a much better book for a nonspecialist who wants to know what linguistics can tell us about human thought.
Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture: The basic idea of "prosthetic memory" is some means of transmitting memories – experiences – to people who didn't actually go through what's being remembered but nonetheless feel some connection to it, mainly because they've seen a movie or gone through a museum that evokes what the experience was like. Landsberg considers modern cinema and museums to be major steps forward in creating prosthetic memories that allow for empathy, rather than mere cultural transmission of memories to people who are ethnically connected to that particular past in some way. Thus, the Holocaust Museum is contrasted to the Passover Seder – the Seder transmits memory by instructing Jews that we, as Jews, were present in Egypt, whereas the Holocaust Museum transmits/creates memories by putting every visitor, no matter what his/her ethnicity, in the place of a person who was sent to the camps. It's an interesting thesis, one that defends modern museums and historical films against criticisms of their inauthenticity and manipulativeness. I would have liked more on the difference between the novel and the film, since the novel seems to me also to have the potential to create new identifications across race, class, gender, etc. – and indeed Landsberg discusses novels about immigrant experiences in detail without noting that they are novels and not films. Moreover, for a book concerned with rehabilitating popular culture, the analysis seemed curiously insensitive to actual popularity, doing close readings of Roots and Rosewood (a 1996 movie by John Singleton) as if the two had equal cultural influence.
misterrivkat highly recommends for its exploration of the links between desire for good-tasting foods and colonialism. This is a collection of essays, and I don't think it's a great place to start, in part because Mintz is doing a lot of speculation and not offering much evidence about, say, the role of food in slave communities. He also goes off at the end, denying that America has a cuisine because, he insists, a cuisine requires repeated exposure to particular foods, such that the possessors of the cuisine have active opinions about what it should be like. But I have opinions about what pizza and burritos should be like and I eat them all the time; what I don't do, and what Mintz seems covertly to assume is required for a cuisine, is cook them. (As misterrivkat points out, I don't cook anything.) If individual household preparation is required for his definition of a cuisine, he should say so and defend that (which would require saying something about gender, because I don't know why Italian men should in general get to claim access to a cuisine just because they're nearby when the women prepare the food). Instead he just expresses bemusement about why many Americans to whom he talks reject his "America has no cuisine" position.George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By: This book is relatively old and short; Lakoff & Johnson begin the project of defining and exploring metaphors that structure our thought. A lot of it is conceptual and English-focused, and I didn't get much out of the detailed investigations into various metaphors like "time is money." Women, Fire and Dangerous Things would be a much better book for a nonspecialist who wants to know what linguistics can tell us about human thought.
Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture: The basic idea of "prosthetic memory" is some means of transmitting memories – experiences – to people who didn't actually go through what's being remembered but nonetheless feel some connection to it, mainly because they've seen a movie or gone through a museum that evokes what the experience was like. Landsberg considers modern cinema and museums to be major steps forward in creating prosthetic memories that allow for empathy, rather than mere cultural transmission of memories to people who are ethnically connected to that particular past in some way. Thus, the Holocaust Museum is contrasted to the Passover Seder – the Seder transmits memory by instructing Jews that we, as Jews, were present in Egypt, whereas the Holocaust Museum transmits/creates memories by putting every visitor, no matter what his/her ethnicity, in the place of a person who was sent to the camps. It's an interesting thesis, one that defends modern museums and historical films against criticisms of their inauthenticity and manipulativeness. I would have liked more on the difference between the novel and the film, since the novel seems to me also to have the potential to create new identifications across race, class, gender, etc. – and indeed Landsberg discusses novels about immigrant experiences in detail without noting that they are novels and not films. Moreover, for a book concerned with rehabilitating popular culture, the analysis seemed curiously insensitive to actual popularity, doing close readings of Roots and Rosewood (a 1996 movie by John Singleton) as if the two had equal cultural influence.
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From:
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The last stuff I read on memory was Elizabeth Loftus. Her take on people's response to [real]experience was something along the lines of "after they've seen enough of the video, they "remember" where they were even if they weren't anywhere near there." It was odd to consider. I mean I distinctly remember where I was, for instance, when the [first] shuttle blew up. I found it hard to fathom how people could put themselves someplace they weren't for a major event.
Don't know why. I mean if everyone I've heard say they were at Candlestick Park for the Loma Prieta Quake were actually there, the park would have to have been four times the size it is.
From:
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If you feel like you've experienced an event up close, then it makes sense to remember it that way -- it's the emotional truth. I don't remember much about the shuttle explosion. It wasn't as big a deal for me as for others, I guess. But I have very powerful memories of much of 9/11. Because I was in New York and DC, I don't know how 9/11 memories differ for people in, say, California.
From:
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Thanks for the review.
From:
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The only big point Mintz gets wrong in "Sweetness & Power", IMO, is that he argues that sweetness is an arbitrary taste to be so important. This merely proves to me that he has not tasted human milk as an adult, because it is *very* sweet to the taste -- much sweeter than cow's milk. I think our reaction to sugar is better explained as a superstimulus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superstimulushttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superstimulus) than as an arbitrary construct.
From:
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And tell misterrivkat that just because one cannot cook does not mean one cannot enjoy and appreciate food! So there!
From:
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