Spec course description, January 2022:
Eating, Drinking, and Smoking: The Anthropology of Food and Medicine. Ingestion—the introduction of foreign matter into the body cavity via the mouth—is among the most intimate things we do as animals, yet we do it all the time. It is also evolutionarily deep—internal digestion appears early on in the history of the Metazoa, and there are no clades where it subsequently disappeared. In this course, convened via a combination of lectures and discussions, we take these observations as starting points for a wide-ranging discussion of the history and anthropology of food and medicine. The fact that taking things into the body is both intimate and ordinary makes it a good starting point for considering how culture mediates our experience of our bodies and the other-than-self world—thus, this course represents, among other things, an introduction to anthropology as a discipline for interested students with no prior exposure to it. Case studies will be drawn from across the histories of food and medicine, with an emphasis on making the familiar strange and the strange familiar via comparisons between historical cases and the habits of eating and drug-taking familiar from our own lives. We will devote special attention to the ingestion of mind-altering substances, including sugar, caffeine, alcohol, and tobacco, along with more specialized substances such as pituri and ayahuasca. Working as individuals or in pairs students will be expected to formulate a manageable field-based research project of their own—Tokyo is perhaps the best city in the world for street food, not to say coffee, and opportunities to observe people consuming food and drugs “in the wild” abound. This project, together with participation in discussions, will serve as the basis for evaluation.
It all sounds so easy.