As I wrote before I am living in Germany and learning German. On Tuesday and Thursday mornings I spend 2.5 hours with ten strangers from all over the world. We have little in common except that we are foreigners living in Germany struggling to integrate. Our conversations with each other are in German, and inevitably about such topics as why it is so difficult to remember how to get the right ending on a comparative adjective (is it –e, -en, -er, -em, -es, etc.?).…
Language Learning, Stigma, and Protecting a Potentially Spoiled Identity
This blog is about why ethnographer Erving Goffman’s observation of stigma are important not just to ex-cons, but also to professors like me on foreign exchange programs. Goffman, as many sociologists and anthropologists know, observed the maneuvers of the marginalized and stigmatized in society, and then wrote about how they thought about their disability. He saw that the marginalized were constantly managed their spoiled social identities because they feared public exposure of their disability.…
Conclusion: The American Diet by Chunyan Song (Part VI)
by Chunyan Song
It took a long journey and a health crisis to turn my diet and health around. I am married to a vegetarian. Together we try to raise two health-conscious kids. I haven’t eaten a Whopper Jr. Sandwich for years. Nowadays, I have a dozen fruit trees and a vegetable garden in the backyard, along with fourteen free-range chickens. I love my hens. They are hardworking and lay all the eggs for my family and a few friends.…
Identity–You Are What You Eat (Part V)
by Chunyan Song
What we eat and how we eat is part of the self-identity construction process that expresses and defines who we are. When we eat, we not only eat with our mouths for nutrition, but also to replenish our beliefs, mindsets, and social beings[1]. Look at the TV if you do not believe me. Advertisements on TV often portray masculine men, instead of women, eating big burgers and red meat.…
The Sad SAD Diet (Part IV)
by Chunyan Song
The fast-paced modern life we live in America does not encourage healthy eating. A lot of us get food from where our cars get fuel, meaning we buy gas, and then dash into AM/PM to load up on hot dogs and chips. We eat last night’s leftovers in front of our computers. When we are too busy to go inside a restaurant, we pick up our orders at the windows of the drive-through.…
Mass Food Production and Its Ills (Part III)
by Chunyan Song
In 1999, on my first American grocery shopping trip at Safeway in Tempe, Arizona, I marveled at the size, shape, and color of the bell peppers, carrots, eggplants, apples, grapes, and cauliflowers. They looked too big, too round, too bright, and too perfect to be real. I had to touch them and feel them to convince myself that they were not fake. Behind the too-perfect-to-be real presentation of American produce in supermarkets is the genetically modified (GM) food industry and food marketing system.…
Edibles and Non-Edibles (Part II)
by Chunyan Song
Although many Americans have to be on restricted diets due to religious or health reasons, many others voluntarily avoid certain foods because material wealth and food abundance grant them the opportunity to pick and choose. When I first came to the U.S, I was struck by how limited Americans’ food choices were. As a popular saying goes, Chinese eat everything that flies except the airplane and everything with four legs except the table.…
We Are What We Eat, Part I
We Are What We Eat (An Introduction to Six Essays!)
by Chunyan Song
“Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are.”
—Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarian, The Physiology of Taste (1825)
America has opened my eyes to a variety of diets that I had never even known before my immigration from China to the United States seventeen years ago. It seems that most Americans I have encountered are either on one type of diet or another due to weight concerns or allergy issues.…
Editor’s Note on “My Adventures with the American Diet,” a Series by Chunyan Song
By Chunyan Song
California State University, Chico
Introductory Note to Series
Chunyan Song is my good friend and colleague at California State University, Chico. She emigrated to the United States from China in 1999 to study for a PhD in Sociology, and marry her husband Josh. She eventually ended up at Chico State where we have taught together for many years. The following six essays are her reflections on the 17 years she has spent eating in the United States—everything from a daily Burger King, to gluten free.…
The Eyewitness Fallacy: Are Studies of China Best Done in China, or the British Library?
Ethnographers love to travel.They will always assert that travel is necessary to understand a culture.You need to travel, to feel the culture. And without such exposure, we reason that what is written is less valid because it cannot possibly be written with the critical perspective that local context provides.Or as Bronislaw Malinwoski himself once wrote, field observation is necessary “to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world.”…
“Notes on the Murders of Thirty of My Neighbors”
Writer Jim Myers wondered why 30 of his neighbors were murdered just one mile east of the United States Capitol building during the 1990s. In an investigation of the conditions that led to such a high toll, he found that there was a wide range of circumstances, including, “drive-by killings, run-by killings, sneak up killings, gunfights and battles, car chases…drug killings, vengeance killings, the killing of witnesses to other crimes, accidental killings, and killings that enforce values we can only vaguely fathom.”…
Anthropology without Villains: Kurt’s Vonnegut’s Master’s Degree in Anthropology for Cat’s Cradle
Kurt Vonnegut just got published in the Chicago Tribune, even though he has been quite dead for the last nine years. So it goes. The title of the article is “The Secret Ingredient in my Books is that there Never has been a Villain,” even though he wrote about things like atomic bombs, The Holocaust, and the firebombing of Dresden. But the new newspaper article is not about these depressing things, rather it is mostly about the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago where his M.…