Food and Power - (California Studies in Food and Culture) by Nir Avieli (Paperback)

About the Book

"Drawing on ethnography conducted in Israel since the late 1990s, Food and Power considers how power is produced, reproduced, negotiated, and subverted in the contemporary Israeli culinary sphere. Nir Avieli explores issues such as the definition of Israeli cuisine, the ownership of hummus, the privatization of communal Kibbutz dining rooms, and food at a military prison for Palestinian detainees to show how cooking and eating create ambivalence concerning questions of strength and weakness and how power and victimization are mixed into a sense of self-justification that maintains internal cohesion among Israeli Jews."--Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

Drawing on ethnography conducted in Israel since the late 1990s, Food and Power considers how power is produced, reproduced, negotiated, and subverted in the contemporary Israeli culinary sphere. Nir Avieli explores issues such as the definition of Israeli cuisine, the ownership of hummus, the privatization of communal Kibbutz dining rooms, and food at a military prison for Palestinian detainees to show how cooking and eating create ambivalence concerning questions of strength and weakness and how power and victimization are mixed into a sense of self-justification that maintains internal cohesion among Israeli Jews.

From the Back Cover

"Food and Power gives us much to ponder about contemporary Israeli society, as well as the weight of history upon it. However, it also has much to teach those whose primary interests may lie far away from the contemporary Middle East, Zionism, or the history of Israel. Indeed, each and every chapter in this book works well as a case study of a food phenomenon that gives us insight into how cultural and social power relationships and tensions are manifested through food practices, and this helps us to think about how such dynamics apply to other places. This is a superb book."--Ellen Oxfeld, author of Bitter and Sweet: Food, Meaning, and Modernity in Rural China

"Ostensibly a study of food practices in Israel, Food and Power is in fact a highly original analysis, via the medium of those practices, of the ways in which Israeli insecurities are experienced and understood. It offers a remarkably well-argued analysis of precisely those things that make many Israelis uncomfortable with their role in the world--whether as the occupiers of Palestinian lands or as often boorish tourists abroad. As in the work of the late Sidney Mintz, to whose memory Avieli pays a fitting tribute, we see here that food is 'not just food' but a medium for the assertion of cultural characteristics that allow Israelis to accept a role in the world that others regard with dislike."--Michael Herzfeld, author of Siege of the Spirits: Community and Polity in Bangkok
"There is much to appreciate in Food and Power. Avieli writes in an impeccably lucid and uniformly accessible style, and the scholarship throughout is of the highest standards and demonstrates the impressive breadth and depth of his reading. He moves adroitly between national, regional and even global patterns, on the one hand, and an intimate examination of particular ethnographic settings (for the most part settings in which he himself participated), on the other. This is a superb volume"--Stanley Brandes, author of Skulls to the Living, Bread to the Dead: The Day of the Dead in Mexico and Beyond

Review Quotes

"Avieli's book reveals not only power dynamics associated with what we eat, but also how we, as a community member or as an outsider researcher within it, use food to establish our 'place' in society."-- "Digest: A Journal of Foodways & Culture"

About the Author

Nir Avieli is a Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ben Gurion University, Israel.