This collection of twelve papers on the ethnography of food and kinship in Southeast Asia probes a possible gap in understandings of kinship and the substance of relationships, and proves that what is actually done with food is a topic that repays a very close-grained analysis.
This collection of twelve papers on the ethnography of food and kinship in Southeast Asia probes a possible gap in understandings of kinship and the substance of relationships, and proves that what is actually done with food is a topic that repays a very close-grained analysis.
[T]his volume makes a creative contribution to the ethnography of Southeast Asian societies as well as to the ever-expanding debate within anthropology about the nature of ‘kinship’, a debate which has been revitalised by the conceptual challenges posed by the spread of new reproductive technologies. As the authors conclude, the sort of analyses presented here might well be fruitfully pursued in other ethnographic regions too, for food is everywhere a powerful mediator of relationships.