City Libraries, City of Gold Coast

The psychopolitics of food, culinary rites of passage in the neoliberal age, Mihalis Mentinis

eng

Includes bibliographical references and index

no index present

non fiction

The psychopolitics of food

Mihalis Mentinis

Concepts for critical psychology

culinary rites of passage in the neoliberal age

The Psychopolitics of Food probes into the contemporary `foodscape', examining culinary practices and food habits and in particular the ways in which they conflate with neoliberal political economy. It suggests that generic alimentary and culinary practices constitute technologies of the self and the body and argues that the contemporary preoccupation with food takes the form of `rites of passage' that express and mark the transition from a specific stage of neoliberal development to another vis-a-vis a re-configuration of the alimentary and sexual regimes. Even though these rites of passage are taking place on the borders of cultural bi-polarities, their function, nevertheless, is precisely to define these borders as sites of a neoliberal transitional demand; that is, to produce a cultural bifurcation between `eating orders' and `eating dis-orders', by promoting and naturalising certain social logics while simultaneously rendering others as abject and anachronistic. The book is a worthwhile read for researchers and advanced scholars in the areas of food studies, critical psychology, anthropology and sociology

Introduction: Culinary Rites of Passage in the Neoliberal Age -- 1: From Unemployment to `Creative' Adaptability: Romanticised Chefs and the Psychopolitics of Gastroporn -- 2: From the Semiotic to the Symbolic: Placentophagy and the Name-of- the-Chef -- 3: From Colonialism to Neoliberal Multiculturalism: A Mapuche Spice in the Chilean National Cuisine -- 4: From East to West: Economic Crisis and the Cooking of the New Greeks -- 5: From Eating to Starving: Gastrosexual Men and Anorectic Women -- Conclusion: Towards a Theory of Anorectic Cannibalism