Bitter and sweet : food, meaning, and modernity in rural China
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Bitter and sweet : food, meaning, and modernity in rural China
（California studies in food and culture, 63）
University of California Press, c2017
- : pbk
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 235-244) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Less than a half century ago, China experienced a cataclysmic famine, which was particularly devastating in the countryside. As a result, older people in rural areas have experienced in their lifetimes both extreme deprivation and relative abundance of food. Young people, on the other hand, have a different relationship to food. Many young rural Chinese are migrating to rapidly industrializing cities for work, leaving behind backbreaking labor but also a connection to food through agriculture. Bitter and Sweet examines the role of food in one rural Chinese community as it has shaped everyday lives over the course of several tumultuous decades. In her superb ethnographic accounts, Ellen Oxfeld compels us to reexamine some of the dominant frameworks that have permeated recent scholarship on contemporary China and that describe increasing dislocation and individualism and a lack of moral centeredness. By using food as a lens, she shows a more complex picture, where connectedness and sense of place continue to play an important role, even in the context of rapid change.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations Preface and Acknowledgments Note on the Text 1 * The Value of Food in Rural China 2 * Labor 3 * Memory 4 * Exchange 5 * Morality 6 * Conviviality Conclusion: Stitching the World Together Appendix A Appendix B Notes Glossary References Index
by "Nielsen BookData"