Tea is a beverage that has long been taken to symbolize a key aspect of Chinese tradition and history. However, it is one of many beverages drunk in contemporary China, where in recent times knowledge of wine has come to stand for the West and as a much-desired cultural capital. This dissertation examines everyday tea drinking and tea tasting in Dalian—a northeastern city in Liaoning Province, China. Through ethnography of practices, processes, and interactions taking place in daily events of tea drinking and tasting, this dissertation provides a window into social conflicts, ideas and desires, historical consciousness, and national identity, individualism, and collectivism, in a contemporary Chinese city. It explores questions of why and how people learn to taste tea by acquiring certain levels of knowledge and skill that is valued in tea culture, and how people drink and taste tea in different social scenarios and contexts. Then it explores the significance of tea drinking and tasting to people in their daily life and as part of ritualized social relations, and specifically in contrast to beverages such as wine. As representative of Chinese culture, tea tasting raises questions of how sensory capabilities should be honed and deployed, and the relationship between so-called “objective” scientific knowledge of taste and the tacit, embodied skill that is associated with traditional cultural understandings.

abstract: Lay theories of healthy eating are a potentially important consideration for public health and nutrition efforts as perceptions and beliefs about “healthiness” are key determinants of dietary choices (Furst et al. 1996; Grunert, 2007). A rich body of social science literature has examined how people across cultures decide what counts as healthy eating, yet such work has focused mainly on what people think is good and bad to consume, overlooking another important aspect- how one eats. The ways one eats can include patterns and timing of meal intake, as well as mental and emotional states during eating (henceforth, “eating styles”). This dissertation aims to 1) examine whether beliefs on eating styles constitute a separate category of healthy eating perceptions, 2) describe American and Eastern European lay models of how both food characteristics and styles of eating shape health outcomes, and 2) investigate cross-cultural variation in the endorsement of eating styles as important for health in the United States and Eastern Europe. Aims 1 and 2 use pile sorts (n=48), in-person interviews (n=49), and online surveys (n=283) to elicit subjective perspectives on how different eating considerations impact health, and aim 3 involves two sets of questionnaires collected in the U.S. (n=50; n=42) and Eastern Europe (n=42; n=35) to test the hypothesis that levels of collectivism influence variation in endorsement of eating styles for health. Results demonstrate that “eating styles” is a separate category of beliefs in people’s models of healthy eating and individuals in both cultures perceive a variety of important health outcomes from how one eats- weight management, energy levels, digestive health, and overall feeling of wellbeing. These perceptions are not uniform, as participants held contrasting models of how styles of food consumption can influence weight control, and Eastern European respondents held additional views on how aspects of food timing can affect long-term health. Finally, results show that individual level of collectivism, not differences in nationality, accounts for variation in endorsement of eating styles for health. These results suggest that the holistic pattern of attention characteristic of the collectivist social orientation extends to the domain of diet. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Anthropology 2017

The following thesis discusses how bizarre food is conceptualized within the anthropology of food and how it connects to symbolic anthropology. Through the complex description of the individual experience during the process of eating bizarre foods, the perception of the experience and the various motivations behind it will be explained. From an anthropological point of view it will be examined whether bizarre foods are the carriers of cultural significance and how this is further demonstrated within the culture. Through analysis of some specific foods I will also try to reveal their symbolic meaning.

Submitted by Marlene Santos (marlene.bc.ufg@gmail.com) on 2016-08-02T18:47:57Z No. of bitstreams: 3 Dissertação - AMÉLIA CRISTINA STIVAL DUARTE- 2015 - Parte 1.pdf: 744402 bytes, checksum: 764e5457e4f8cefe95dde2689edf3e76 (MD5) Dissertação - AMELIA CRISTIAN STIVAL DUARTE - ficha catalográfica - PARTE 2.pdf: 5867 bytes, checksum: 10acd8fff8a4e6ca71c1d0c16efae8aa (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Luciana Ferreira (lucgeral@gmail.com) on 2016-08-03T13:12:05Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 3 Dissertação - AMÉLIA CRISTINA STIVAL DUARTE- 2015 - Parte 1.pdf: 744402 bytes, checksum: 764e5457e4f8cefe95dde2689edf3e76 (MD5) Dissertação - AMELIA CRISTIAN STIVAL DUARTE - ficha catalográfica - PARTE 2.pdf: 5867 bytes, checksum: 10acd8fff8a4e6ca71c1d0c16efae8aa (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-08-03T13:12:05Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 3 Dissertação - AMÉLIA CRISTINA STIVAL DUARTE- 2015 - Parte 1.pdf: 744402 bytes, checksum: 764e5457e4f8cefe95dde2689edf3e76 (MD5) Dissertação - AMELIA CRISTIAN STIVAL DUARTE - ficha catalográfica - PARTE 2.pdf: 5867 bytes, checksum: 10acd8fff8a4e6ca71c1d0c16efae8aa (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-09-25 / This research was developed based on the argument that, however there a medical/ nutritional speech, the complex web of relationships involving the issue "food" makes it to be transferred to people's daily lives in a different way. Therefore the research followed with the aim to understand how women who work outside the home - a group of public servants that works in a public Health Institution in Goias - Brazil (Secretaria de Estado da Saúde de Goiás) - understand the sense of health food considering the multivocality of the subject. The methodology included conducting an observation-based ethnography and individual interviews with the servants that allowed to understand the representations of eating healthy structured into two main categories: space and time. In this sense, I came to the understanding that the meals eaten at home are linked to the notion of health for much more complex reasons than those involving nutritional matters. The house takes an idealized character, since most women are expanding their areas of expertise and thus acting more intensely out of the private sphere. So the healthy eating concept ends up being perceived more as a desire, a dream to be fulfilled, but given the constraints given by the demands of contemporary society ends up becoming a more guided practice in speech and with poor adherence in everyday life. / A pesquisa desenvolvida esteve fundamentada no argumento que, por mais que haja um o discurso médico/nutricional, a rede complexa de relações envolvida no tema alimentação faz com que ele seja transferido para o cotidiano das pessoas de uma forma diferenciada. É nesta direção que a pesquisa seguiu, ou seja, com o objetivo de compreender como as mulheres que trabalham fora de casa, no caso as servidoras públicas da Superintendência de Vigilância em Saúde da Secretaria de Estado da Saúde de Goiás, entendem a noção de alimentação saudável, tendo em vista a multivocalidade que o tema proporciona. A metodologia compreendeu a realização de uma etnografia baseada em observação e entrevistas individualizadas com as servidoras que permitiram entender as representações do comer saudável estruturadas em duas categorias principais: o espaço e o tempo. Neste sentido, cheguei ao entendimento de que as refeições realizadas em casa estão atreladas à noção de saudável por motivos muito mais complexos do que aqueles envolvendo a questão nutricional. Vislumbrou-se que a casa assume um caráter idealizado, uma vez que a grande parte das mulheres está ampliando os seus espaços de atuação e, assim, atuando mais intensamente fora do âmbito privado. Assim a noção de alimentação saudável acaba sendo entendida mais como um desejo, um ideal a ser cumprido, mas que diante das imposições dadas pela demanda da sociedade contemporânea acaba se tornando uma prática mais pautada no discurso e com pouca adesão no cotidiano.

The goal of this thesis is to discuss how unusual delicacies are conceptualized in the perspective of sociocultural anthropology - specifically, in the context of anthropology of food. Unusual delicacies are to be understood as non-traditional, unique, but at the same time, shocking or perceived as "bizarre" meals. The complex description of the individual's experience during the consumption of unusual delicacies will help to analyze what is the overall perception of the experience, its pervasion into self-presentation, as well as what are the main motivations for it. Further, it is discussed what role the unusual delicacies play in the context of exploring foreign countries and whether they possess any cultural and symbolic meaning.