Talking With Your Mouth Full:
brownbag speaker series on social and cultural issues related to food
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Prentice Institute Boardroom
Speakers: Louise Barrett and Jamie MacKenzie
Bring your lunch to the talks. Coffee will be provided. Everyone is welcome to attend.
The Food Speaker Series is organized by the Centre for Culture and Community and the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery.
Louise Barrett
“You eat who you are”
Jamie MacKenzie
“You are who you eat: cannibalism in two keys”
This talk examines cannibalism with an aim to critically assess notions of human and non-human subjectivity in two cultural contexts. While western representations of cannibalism tend to frame it at the far end of cultural otherness, Marshall Sahlins has argued that our most mundane food choices in the West arguably constitute “a sustained metaphor on cannibalism”, signalling the shifting relation between human and non-human subjects (and objects). In some Amerindian contexts, including the Maya as well as Amazonian societies, the cannibal is not so much a wholly external ‘other’ as an ancestor and potential neighbour, and the ‘subject’ status of non-humans is determined on fundamentally different ‘perspectivist’ grounds. “What makes a body, and what bodies are appropriate food?” are questions asked and answered in markedly different ways in these contexts, and their comparison invites a critical assessment of our relation to animals in the West, including our conception of their rights and emergent ‘personhood’.
Further Info:
The Centre for Culture and Community is an initiative by a group of University of Lethbridge faculty to form an organization which will facilitate, support, and nurture academic and public interest in cultural and community based research, creative activity, and education. The CCC mission is to act as a significant resource for U of L faculty, Lethbridge community members, southern Alberta, Canada and beyond in the areas of cultural and community-based studies and creative activity. The CCC will be poised to engage cultural and community-based research projects, creative activity, and other collaborative partnerships. The CCC will mobilize university-based and community-based resources and the potential social capital embodied in them as a ‘network’ to make resources available to both academic and non-academic communities. The CCC is dedicated to establishing and facilitating a democratic network of scholarly, creative, interested interchanges that will provide the foundations and resources for a plurality of expertise and experience. It will not only study community but will build or reinforce academic and non-academic communities, fostering reciprocal interchange within and between them.
The University of Lethbridge Art Gallery is presenting a Food Series of exhibitions during the fall semester, 2011. For more information, visit ulag.ca or drop by the art gallery on the 6th level of the Centre for the Arts (behind the Moses sculpture and the stairwell).
