Presentation Title: "Food and Moral Predicaments in Rural China: Past and Present
Presented by: Ellen Oxfeld, Middlebury College
Date: Wednesday, January 28
Time: 3:00 - 4:30 pm
Location: Mildred Livak Room, Davis Center
This lecture will explore how food in China has been implicated in a variety of moral predicaments, in particular famine, food safety and filiality.
Ellen Oxfeld is the Gordon Schuster Professor of Anthropology at Middlebury College. Since the mid-1990s, she has returned several times to do fieldwork in a village in Meixian, Guangdong Province, China, where she has investigated moral discourse, changes and continuities in life-cycle rituals, changing gender roles, transformations in property and class relations, and most recently, changes in the local food system. Her most recent book, Drink Water but Remember the Source, explores moral discourses in a period of economic transformation. Her next book looks at changes in the contemporary Chinese food system.