"Let Them Eat Stuffed Peppers”: An Argument of Images on the role of Food in Understanding Neoliberal Austerity in Greece

David E. Sutton (Southern Illinois University)

Abstract

This paper focuses on how discourses of food have shaped understandings of what’s at stake in the Greek crisis over the past 6 years. Drawing from the concepts of “embeddedness” (Polanyi), “abstraction” (Carrier & Miller) and “moral economy” (Thompson, Scott), I argue that food is central to Greek debates and understandings of neoliberal policies and processes because of its centrality to Greek culture and identity. Food has also been a site of contested practices of “solidarity” and “charity” by which new social experiments and understandings are emerging in the wake of the break-down of the welfare state. In arguing for food’s centrality in the reshaping of Greek sociability, I will suggest that food not be thought of simply as a “topic” for anthropological investigation, but as a master-concept on the level of “kinship,” “ritual” or “exchange” in any anthropological analysis of contemporary life.

Recording

"Let Them Eat Stuffed Peppers”: An Argument of Images on the role of Food in Understanding Neoliberal Austerity in Greece

Blogs

In advance of the lecture, UC Press author and distinguished anthropologist David E. Sutton gives readers a taste of his upcoming lecture, “‘Let Them Eat Stuffed Peppers’: An Argument of Images on the role of Food in Understanding Neoliberal Austerity in Greece”, in a web exclusive on Gastronomica .

Dr Giovanni Orlando (University of Turin) has created a post-lecture blog piece, "'Let Them Eat Stuffed Peppers': David Sutton on food and neoliberal austerity in Greece" , on the ALTFOODCRISIS – ‘The Value of Alternative Food Networks After the Crisis: An Italian Case Study’ project.

Biography

David Sutton is Professor of Anthropology at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Since the early 1990s he has been conducting research on the island of Kalymnos and has published three books based on this research: Memories Cast in Stone: The Relevance of the Past in Everyday Life (Berg, 1998) which explores Kalymnian historical consciousness, Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory (Berg, 2001), and Secrets from the Greek Kitchen: Cooking, Skill and Everyday Life on an Aegean Island (California, 2014). These latter explore food practices in relation to questions of memory, history gender and technology. He is also co-editor of The Restaurants Book and co-author of Hollywood Blockbusters: The Anthropology of Popular Movies .

Organiser: SOAS Food Studies Centre and Centres and Programmes Office

Contact email: centres@soas.ac.uk

Contact Tel: +44 (0)20 7898 4893

Sponsor: Co-sponsored by Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies