Anthropology of Food & Diet :
a guide to library resources
Contents:
Starting points | Finding books |Finding journal articles | Web resources
Related guide which may be helpful:
Medical Anthropology |
STARTING POINTS
When you need to define your topic and/or get some background reading try consulting a dictionary or encyclopedia on food habits.
The guide to Anthropology dictionaries/encyclopedias will help if you need explanations of anthropological terminology or theory.
To find overviews on the subject try the following:
- Anthropology of food & eating (2002) [electronic]
[Concentrates primarily on works published after 1984 but also reviews landmark studies prior to the 1980s. Published in vol.31 of the Annual Review of Anthropology. Also available in print format]
Cultural politics of food and eating: a reader (2005) [print]
[A collection of readings that uses the study of food as a vehicle for addressing broad themes that are emerging in social anthropology]
- Researching food habits (2004) [print]
[Offers guidance for researchers working in the field of anthropological perspectives on food, diet and nutrition]
FINDING BOOKS USING THE LIBRARY CATALOGUE
Books can be found by searching the library catalogue. Keyword searching is probably the best way of identifying material and your results will be maximised by using keyword searching techniques such as truncation and Boolean searching, and by incorporating subject headings into your search where appropriate. Here are some examples on how to construct searches:
- food and identity
- "drinking customs"
- "food preferences"
- "food habits" and italy
- (nutrition or diet) and (anthropol? or ethnograph?)
FINDING JOURNAL ARTICLES USING DATABASES & BIBLIOGRAPHIES
Journal articles can be found through databases listed in the Databases for Anthropology guide - Sociological Abstracts, Academic OneFile and Academic Search Premier are probably the best starting points for articles written in anthropological journals, and Pubmed for international coverage of biomedical journals.
Also try the World Food Habits bibliography which is a list of resources for the anthropological study of food and culture and the electronic journal Anthropology of food is worth a look especially as it is not yet indexed in the electronic databases listed above.
WEB RESOURCES
The following are starting points for resources on the Web
International Commission on the Anthropology of Food (ICAF)
[The aims of ICAF are to promote and coordinate collaboration and research in biological and social anthropology in regard to the sciences of food and nutrition, fostering in particular a pluridisciplinary approach]
Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition (SAFN)
[An interest group within the American Anthropological Association]
Last update: 4 September 2007
This page is maintained by Helen Attar
|
