Anthropology and Food

Appears in
Oxford Companion to Food

By Alan Davidson

Published 2014

  • About
The study of anthropology (the object of which is man) is like a great palace with many wings, variously named ‘social’, ‘cultural’, ‘economic’, etc. One of its principal methods of investigation is ethnography, the description of peoples.

A guided tour of this building would occupy many pages, having to take due notice of the stylistic differences between the main corps de logis and its outliers, as well as of the many alternate interpretations offered by one nationality or another—social anthropology in Britain needs be distinguished from cultural anthropology in the USA (and then from the hybrid socio-cultural anthropology).