The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating or The Shifts in Hizbullahs Ideology

The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating: A Reader

Author: James L Watson

Food is an important and endlessly fascinating lens for social and cultural analysis –not only for anthropologists, but also for scholars of history, literature, cultural studies, political economy, and public policy. The subject is a central idiom for understanding cultural practices and for teaching about culture on many levels. The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating is a collection of readings that uses the study of food as a vehicle for addressing broad themes that are emerging in social anthropology: globalization, capitalism, market economies, and consumption practices.

The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating offers an ethnographically informed perspective on the ways in which people use food to make sense of life in an increasingly interconnected world. It includes studies from eleven countries across five continents on such hot topics as sushi, fast food, gourmet foods, and food scares and contamination.

Table of Contents:

	Introduction	1
1	How sushi went global	13
2	French beans for the masses : a modern historical geography of food in Burkina Faso	21
3	Fresh demand : the consumption of Chilean produce in the United States	42
4	Coca-Cola : a black sweet drink from Trinidad	54
5	China's Big Mac attack	70
6	Of hamburger and social space : consuming McDonald's in Beijing	80
7	Children's food and Islamic dietary restrictions in Xi'an	106
8	The rise of yuppie coffees and the reimagination of class in the United States	122
9	Crafting Grand Cru chocolates in contemporary France	144
10	Globalized childhood? : Kentucky Fried Chicken in Beijing	163
11	Domesticating the french fry : McDonald's and consumerism in Moscow	180
12	"India shopping" : Indian grocery stores and transnational configurations of belonging	197
13	Food and the counterculture : a story of bread and politics	217
14	Industrial tortillas and folkloric Pepsi : the nutritional consequences of hybrid cuisines in Mexico	235
15	Food, hunger, and the state	251
16	The bakers of Bernburg and the logics of communism and capitalism	259
17	The global food fight	276
18	Half-lives and healthy bodies : discourses on "contaminated" food and healing in post-Chernobyl Ukraine	286
19	Mad cow mysteries	299

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The Shifts in Hizbullah's Ideology: Religious Ideology, Political Ideology, and Political Program

Author: Joseph Elie Alagha

As the recent war in Lebanon demonstrated, an understanding of the Lebanese Shi‘ite militant group Hizbullah remains an important component of any attempt to solve the problems of the Middle East. The Shifts in Hizbullah’s Ideology provides an in-depth analysis of the group’s motivations, tracking the changes it has undergone since Hizbullah’s founding by Lebanese Shi‘ite clergy in 1978. Joseph Alagha demonstrates that Hizbullah, driven at its founding chiefly by religious concerns, in the latter half of the 1980s became a full-fledged social movement, with a structure and ideology aimed at social change. Further changes in the 1990s led to Hizbullah’s becoming a mainstream political party—but without surrendering its militarism or willingness to use violence to advance its ends.
In tracking these changes, The Shifts in Hizbullah’s Ideology covers such disparate topics as Hizbullah’s views of jihad, suicide and martyrdom, integration, pan-Islamism, anti-Zionism, and the relationship with Israel and the United States. It will be necessary reading for both scholars and policymakers.