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Review of Nir Avieli Rice Talks: Food and Community in a Vietnamese Town . Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2012

Review of Nir Avieli Rice Talks: Food and Community in a Vietnamese Town . Bloomington: Indiana... In Rice Talks: Food & Community in a Vietnamese Town , anthropologist Nir Avieli relates how food and eating in the market town of Hoi An in central Vietnam cannot be understood apart from their social cultural and political contexts. Avieli shows how food and eating contain within them coded messages that reflect larger social and cultural processes. These include cosmological philosophies, gender arrangements, religious meanings, ethnic and national identities, other worldly relations, as well as the changing structure of Vietnamese society facilitated through the doi moi policy of economic reforms and the advent of tourism into the region. The work is then a comprehensive study in both its breadth and depth, and Avieli is to be lauded for this publication feat. The work seems to be a response to the dearth in culinary ethnographies in general and on Vietnam, in particular. At the same time, it is also a practical response to the fact that researchers on Vietnam, especially Western scholars, are subject to constant surveillance. Food perceived as a banal and hence non-threatening and non-subversive topic allowed Avieli free access to places and people, and the resulting payoff is seen in the highly detailed ethnographic data http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Asian Journal of Social Science Brill

Review of Nir Avieli Rice Talks: Food and Community in a Vietnamese Town . Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2012

Asian Journal of Social Science , Volume 41 (5): 531 – Jan 29, 2014

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Publisher
Brill
Copyright
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands
Subject
Book Reviews
ISSN
1568-4849
eISSN
1568-5314
DOI
10.1163/15685314-12341318
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

In Rice Talks: Food & Community in a Vietnamese Town , anthropologist Nir Avieli relates how food and eating in the market town of Hoi An in central Vietnam cannot be understood apart from their social cultural and political contexts. Avieli shows how food and eating contain within them coded messages that reflect larger social and cultural processes. These include cosmological philosophies, gender arrangements, religious meanings, ethnic and national identities, other worldly relations, as well as the changing structure of Vietnamese society facilitated through the doi moi policy of economic reforms and the advent of tourism into the region. The work is then a comprehensive study in both its breadth and depth, and Avieli is to be lauded for this publication feat. The work seems to be a response to the dearth in culinary ethnographies in general and on Vietnam, in particular. At the same time, it is also a practical response to the fact that researchers on Vietnam, especially Western scholars, are subject to constant surveillance. Food perceived as a banal and hence non-threatening and non-subversive topic allowed Avieli free access to places and people, and the resulting payoff is seen in the highly detailed ethnographic data

Journal

Asian Journal of Social ScienceBrill

Published: Jan 29, 2014

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