In the first chapter an explicitly comparative approach is selected to examine changing biases in Victorian middle-class values and attitudes through their domestic dinner-parties. Cultural Theory, derived from social anthropology, with an anthropological emphasis on the significance of commensality is integral to this thesis. The contemporary sources are principally didactic works and Marion Sambourne's (1851-1914) Diary and Menu Notebook. Chapter II investigates French and English culinary history to analyse then compare French system and English eclecticism as the foundation for the adoption or rejection of culinary styles amongst Victorian dinner-givers. In chapter III elaborate Victorian dinner-party cuisine is contrasted with daily dinners and nursery food. Chapter IV takes consomme as a core dinner component to define the various dining constituencies by their choices of quality in cooking method, ingredients and presentation. Chapter V assesses a nineteenth-century tendency to stigmatise kitchen work among middle-range dinner-givers. Changes in technology and labour are demonstrated as integral to the resultant cuisine. Chapters VI and VII follow changes in service style from service a la Francaise to service a la Russe which reflected a paradigm shift in social organisation. English service a la Russe made the table a stage to display glass, china, plate, linen, fruit and flowers. This is then discussed in chapter VIII as an iconography of moral and social values to be adopted or rejected by different constituencies. Chapters IX and X are not only concerned with male/female divisions of responsibility as providers and participants, but also in the hierarchic and individualist contexts of dining practice and etiquette. Locality, furnishings, domestic space, etiquette, smoking, wine, male dining and servants' status are related through a discussion of boundaries: physical, conceptual and behavioural. These bring together the strands of classification that are used as a comparative method of deconstructing a move from established hierarchy to greater individualism among Victorian dinner-giving constituencies in London.

This study originated from the issue of consumption taste, and has dealt with the ideologies that formed such taste rather than discussing specific individual taste. I tried to examine how the taste ideologies were formed in a place called Korea, and in the time called the modern age, and what characteristics were formed. This study has been advanced on the assumption that the background of current Korean taste can be verified by tracking the taste ideologies that were formed in the modem age. To achieve this I generally looked over most materials concerned with the subject, especially through perusing two magazines, <New Women> published in 1923-26 and in 1930-34 and <Byulkeon- gon> published in 1926-1934, I could embody the frame of culture in the modem age. Non-western modernity is usually condensed in a short period from the culture which had been naturalised in western society for a long time, and is essentially identical with western modernity, sharing the same contradictions of modernity. However, they are never completely the same because the process of transplantation is a kind of translation or appropriation. To understand the process of translation/appropriation, I will interpret the process of language translation in modern age in Chapter 2. The characteristics of translated language can be the framework to view the formation of modern taste ideologies. In Chapter 3, the adoption process of Western modernity was expanded from the linguistic dimension to the dimension of material culture. Above all, the change of general culture was examined. How things from city planning to transportation, consumption, leisure activities, entertainment, print media, and clothing went through the process of adoption, translation and became Korean modern culture, and how they influenced the formation of Korean modernity were examined in detail. The multilayer meanings and contexts that Korean modernity possesses arose from these scenes of the modern age. The meaning and characteristics of modern material culture that were revealed by the sceneries of the Korean modern age, and the characteristics of translation and translated-words, are gathered into one among the modern discourse. The most influential discourse among those that penetrated Korean modernity was that of modernisation=Westernisation. As West-centrism became internalised to Koreans through modernisation discourse, the West became mythified as a subject of adoration and aspiration. The subjects who produced discourse were the elites who had received modern education. The modern class structure of Korea was mainly reconstructed by the academic background rather than by capital or labour. Even though the number of the elite that received more than secondary school education was extremely small, they had the initiative in producing discourse. They accordingly had a big influence in forming social ideologies. Thus, the formation process of the elites became the key point in providing the characteristics of Korean modernity. The modern age provided the basic ideologies that formed the taste of today. Various characteristics of the Korean modem age established by re-translation/transformation/ imitation of the translated modernity of Japan with aspiration for Western modernity became the factors that established the taste ideologies. People in the modem age learned what to desire, even though they did not achieve its materiality. The modern/West existed far away as an ideological ideal, and the Japanese translation of such ideals existed nearer as a model. Most Koreans could not grasp modem material things due to their economic conditions, but because of that, their ungraspable desire became bigger, and their ideologies became simplified.

This thesis offers a re-reading of the cultural history of East London's working class by focusing on the culture of food. During the 19th century, published reports by philanthropists and investigative journalists such as Jack London (People of the Abyss) tended to portray the East End as a locus of deprivation and immorality where starvation was rife, food was substandard, and ignorance perpetuated a poor diet. Challenges to such perspectives went largely overlooked, and the myth of the bad East End was consolidated. Academic and popular historians such as William Fishman (East End 1888) and Ellen Ross (Love and Toil: motherhood in outcast London, 1870-1912) have continued since then to foreground crime, destitution and the outcast minority. In contrast this study presents a more contradictory and nuanced history of East London's culture. It explores elements of middle- and upper-working class food preparation and consumption practices, cultures of knowledge, and attitudes towards nutrition. It draws on diverse sources such as oral history, local newspapers, personal photographs and scrapbooks, shop records, minutes of meetings, and a child's exercise book. Through these means it makes the case that a sufficient and comprehensive food culture existed both at home and in public spaces in East London. Working-class people sought to expand their knowledge about food and cooking from school and college cookery lessons, public lectures and demonstrations. Furthermore, awareness of food was integral to East End culture; born of economic necessity and shaped by custom, organic knowledge about food was nurtured by the culture's permeable boundaries between public and private, leisure and labour, and production and consumption. Using the Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration of 1904 as a case study, this work explores the broader issue of food within the context of changing conceptions of nutrition. Thus a more inclusive version of East London's history can be offered through an understanding of food culture.

Black women's relationship with food and their bodies is an area that has received limited attention. Although recently it has been reported that Black women's concerns with weight and problems with eating appear to be more common than once thought, to date there have been no studies that have explored Black women's subjective accounts of their eating problems. Therefore a qualitative methodology, Grounded Theory, was employed to analyze the interviews of ten African and African-Caribbean women, in a community setting, who described themselves as having an eating problem. The core theme 'the process of shifting identities' was thought to reflect an overview of their dominant story. For the women, to fit within the norms of the dominant culture, they expressed a relationship with food and their bodies that was seen contrary to their own cultural norms. Nevertheless, the conflicting messages they received from their own communities was experienced as an additional struggle. In managing this process they adopted the parallel process of shifting their identities, although this was not necessary intentional, nonetheless it gave rise to further distress and oppression: silencing due to shame and guilt about being 'different' and 'weak' in their dual cultures. The theoretical and clinical implications in relation to these findings will also be discussed.

No description available.

In my thesis I argue that feeding children in Warsaw involves multiple negotiations, which engage different people, various institutions and take place in varied spaces. Amid these negotiations, adults and children engage in power struggles, which are situated within wider public discourses, political debates and moral perspectives on food and modern personhood. Adults implement strategies in order to feed children in a particular way, whereas children re-negotiate that imposed order using different tactics. Children in many ways influence the process of feeding. At the same time, both adults and children are disciplined and normalized in relation to what is considered the 'proper' way of feeding and eating. They are socialized into 'proper' eaters and feeders by other social actors. I argue that feeding and eating are inextricably connected and cannot be studied separately as they continuously influence one another. The thesis is based on 12 months of fieldwork conducted in Warsaw between September 2012 and August 2013. My fieldwork was based on multi-sited and relational ethnography and included research conducted with working and middle class families and in primary schools. During my fieldwork I treated children, aged 6-12 years old, as independent interlocutors and I used diversified methods when working with them. I also studied state institutions, food companies and food marketers, non-governmental organisations and media debates related to children and food. Drawing from practice theory and building on structural and interactive approaches, I study the ways in which feeding and eating are negotiated between diverse social actors in Warsaw. The thesis discusses diverse moral perspectives on food, discourses and narratives about food and children, multiple experiences and practices related to feeding and eating embedded in the context of postsocialist transformation, shifting notions of parenthood and childhood, and the changing politics of food and food education in Poland.

No description available.

This thesis aims to explore culinary culture as a process around which identity - across a range of scales - is reproduced. It examines the relation between narrative constructions of self and the material practice of food production for individuals involved in the production of culinary culture. The research explores food's relation to identity by examining the oral history life stories of 40 individuals involved in the food industry in England. By focusing on food producers the research examines how discourses of identity (such as race, class and gender) are reproduced by, through and against narratives of food production (such as multiculture, domesticity and authenticity). Neither food nor identity are examined as knowable 'things', but as negotiated processes that are mutually constituted through a range of different yet related discursive practices. Life story interviews provide a means of examining food's relation to identity as shifting, provisional, nebulous, contestable and contingent. Moreover, the life story approach makes possible an analysis of food production and consumption through narrative accounts of a person's life. By interrogating the intersections of food, sUbjectivities and histories, and commercial retail practices, the research situates the individual within the sphere of production. In so doing the thesis assesses the relation between work and home, food production and food consumption, narrative and practice, and their relation to discourses of identity and food in contemporary Britain.

In recent decades, many Chinese have experienced changes in their eating as a result of a shift from food shortages to an expansion of food markets. Many urban Chinese make choices from a variety of food, and food safety incidents frequently reported in the media have raised consumer concerns with food quality and the potential effects of foods on human health. Meanwhile, some urban dwellers worry about overweight, hypertension, cardiovascular diseases, and other health threats as a result of, for example, diets that are high in fats and sugar. Some studies have examined how consumers respond to food-related anxieties in China. These studies have suggested that they may change their eating or shopping patterns and rely on external indicators such as, brands and vendor types. A number of these studies are based on quantitative calculations of patterns of participants’ behaviours or perceptions. However, they pay little attention to how ordinary people experience and deal with food-related anxieties. Moreover, individuals seem to be passive and dependent on institutional efforts to control food-related anxieties. With the use of interview and participant observation data, this research analyses how participants deal with the food-related anxieties they experience in everyday life through their daily food and eating practices. The research demonstrates participants’ activity to deal with their food safety and health concerns in light of Mauss’s (1973) concept of ‘body techniques’, and de Certeau’s (1984) discussion of ‘strategies’ and ‘tactics’. By drawing on Mauss’s (1973) concept, the study offers an understanding of food-related anxieties and the practice of home cooking to deal with those anxieties through the perspective of embodiment. My research also challenges the existing literature which suggests ordinary people are passive and subject to institutional strategies to deal with food-related anxieties. With reference to Mauss (1973) and de Certeau (1984), participants have agency to respond to food safety and health concerns according to their acquired eating habits and the social circumstances to which they belong. The findings suggest that participants tactically use embodied knowledge and techniques of home cooking transmitted across generations to deal with food safety and health concerns in contemporary China.

This thesis seeks to explore and understand how people perceive and experience the village pub. There has, over the course of time, been a general decline in the social and economic importance of the village pub as well as in their number. The decline in number has accelerated in recent years and been the focus of much media attention with some reports claiming that it has negative consequences for rural life (see, for example, Hill, 2008; Scruton, 2006). Despite this there has been very little social science research conducted on this topic. This research helps to fill this knowledge gap. By using empirical data, principally collected in villages in Lincolnshire and from various groups (mainly newcomer residents, long-standing residents and publicans) to explore multiple representations of the village pub this thesis provides an in-depth exploration and interpretation of the values underpinning the research participants’ representations and experiences of the village pub. In doing this, the thesis shows that village pubs are seen and experienced as adding value of different kinds – economic, social, and cultural, and that the different groups attach different levels of importance to these kinds of value. It also shows that, whilst the different kinds of value can work in the Bourdieusian interpretation as capital, and be self-expanding and inter-convertible, they can also work to undermine one another. By showing how the village pub is seen through the lens of nostalgia and the rural idyll and that contradictions exist between how the village pub is remembered or imagined and how it ‘really’ is, this thesis contributes to rural studies literature and, more specifically, to that which engages with the cultural turn as well as to pub literature. The thesis also offers a contribution to practice. It does this first, by imparting knowledge, to different groups, on the types (economic, social and cultural) of diversification that can be used to help sustain village pubs, especially in Lincolnshire; and second, by showing those groups that beliefs and practices around diversification have important consequences for the sustainability of village pubs.