This page contains PDFs of the course readings. We will use these for our group annotation practice in critical reading.

Click the title of a reading to go to a PDF with the hypothes.is annotation tool built in (no browser plugin necessary, but you’ll need a hypothes.is account).

To make annotations: Once you’re viewing the PDF, click the tab at the top right to expand the hypothes.is annotation pane.

Log in if necessary.

Making meaning, circulating value(s)

October 7

• Foster, Robert J. 2008. “Qualifying Products: Trademarks, Brands, and Value Creation.” In Coca-Globalization: Following Soft Drinks from New York to New Guinea, 75–97. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

• Pratt, Jeff. 2007. “Food Values: The Local and the Authentic.” Critique of Anthropology 27 (3): 285–300.

In-class exercise:

1. Join the private group for this class in Hypothesis. 
2. Go to the Pratt reading (link above). Select one paragraph from the text. 
3. Highlight the paragraph and create an annotation.
4. Briefly summarize the paragraph in your own words.
5. Find a Youtube video or some other online source that’s relevant and link some text in your annotation to that source. (Don’t just paste the link into your annotation; use the link icon to hyperlink some text from your annotation.)
6. Format some part of your annotation as bold or italic.
7. Find a relevant image and add it to your annotation.

Hint: use the Preview feature to preview what your annotation will look like before you post it.

October 14

• Meneley, Anne. 2007. “Like an Extra Virgin.” American Anthropologist 109 (4): 678–87. https://anthrosource-onlinelibrary-wiley-com.ez-proxy.brooklyn.cuny.edu/doi/abs/10.1525/aa.2007.109.4.678

Class exercise: what’s the point?

1. In small groups, discuss what you think the main point of this article is. When your group has come to a consensus, write one or two clear, concise sentences (in your own words) that paraphrase the article’s main point.
2. Highlight a short passage in the text where the author gives evidence to support the main point, then create a Hypothesis annotation.
3. Type your paraphrase of the main point in the annotation text box.
4. Write two or three more sentences describing why you think the highlighted text provides evidence of the main point.

Politics, territory, capital

October 21

• Poe, Tracey N. 2002. “The Origins of Soul Food in Black Urban Identity: Chicago, 1915–1947.” In Food in the USA: A Reader, edited by Carole Counihan, 91–108. New York: Routledge.
• Weiss, Brad. 2014. “In Tastes, Lost and Found: Remembering the Real Flavor of Fat Pork.” In Fat: Culture and Materiality, edited by Christopher E. Forth and Alison Leitch, 33–51. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Class exercise: summarizing evidence

1. See the annotation at the end of the Poe chapter. I have identified this as a summary of one of the main points of the article.
2. Each group should create a new annotation in the previous sections of the article. Highlight a few sentences in which Poe offers evidence of “the integration of rural Southern culture into urban African American consciousness” where foodways are a “natural vehicle for the expression…of freedom” (105)?
3. In the text of your annotation, paraphrase what Poe is describing.

October 28

• Netz, Reviel. 2000. “Barbed Wire.” London Review of Books, July 20, 2000. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v22/n14/reviel-netz/barbed-wire.
• Specht, Joshua. 2019. “Introduction.” In Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America, 1–20. Histories of Economic Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

November 4

• Gaudio, Rudolph P. 2003. “Coffeetalk: Starbucks^TM and the Commercialization of Casual Conversation.” Language in Society 32 (5): 659–91. 
• Peekhaus, Wilhelm. 2011. “Primitive Accumulation and Enclosure of the Commons: Genetically Engineered Seeds and Canadian Jurisprudence.” Science & Society 75 (4): 529–54.

November 11

• Ficek, Rosa E. 2019. “Cattle, Capital, Colonization: Tracking Creatures of the Anthropocene in and out of Human Projects.” Current Anthropology 60 (S20): S260–71. 
• Levy, Jonathan. 2012. “Trading the Future.” In Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America, 231–63. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Food (in)justice

November 18

• Paxson, Heather. 2019. “‘Don’t Pack a Pest’: Parts, Wholes, and the Porosity of Food Borders.” Food, Culture & Society 22 (5): 657–73.
• Siskind, Janet. 2002. “The Invention of Thanksgiving: A Ritual of American Nationality.” In Food in the USA: A Reader, edited by Carole Counihan, 41–58. New York: Routledge.

December 2

• Folch, Christine. 2008. “Fine Dining: Race in Prerevolution Cuban Cookbooks.” Latin American Research Review 43 (2): 205–23.
• Joassart-Marcelli, Pascale, and Fernando J. Bosco. 2014. “Alternative Food Projects, Localization and Neoliberal Urban Development: Farmers’ Markets in Southern California.” Métropoles, no. 15 (December). https://doi.org/10.4000/metropoles.4970.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.