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Tag: Sidney Mintz

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Mystery Object #21: Frosted Turkey Cake

November 27, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

This Thanksgiving featured something that I just couldn’t resist adding to my online collection of mystery objects—a cake frosted to look like a roast turkey, complete with frosted lettuce and carrot garnish. (I took a photo of it next to a butter dish for effect.) Why anyone would ever want a cake-shaped meat is beyond me, but its curious existence was a source of joy for folks assembled at our Thanksgiving table. Such a unique sugary creation harkens back to […]

Categories: Food, Mystery Objects • Tags: Sidney Mintz, sugar, Thanksgiving, turkey

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Mystery Object #16: Chocolate Cross for Easter

April 13, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

  While at the checkout counter at a local grocery store last week I noticed a chocolate cross for sale as Easter candy. Made by a well-known local chocolatier, Abdallah, it immediately it struck me as curious. I suppose the sweet object could be interpreted as a creative extension of the chocolate Easter bunny into the realm of religious observance. As religious icon the cross is a powerful religious symbol—indeed evoking the death and ascendence of a God—the cornerstone of […]

Categories: Mystery Objects • Tags: Abdallah Chocolates, chocolate, cross, Easter, holiday, Sidney Mintz, sugar

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Eating Uncrustables®, Eating Dog

November 4, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

A basic methodological assumption of anthropology is cultural relativism—that people in specific cultures have reasons for what they do that are contextually meaningful and that understanding of the things they do should be examined in context. Understanding aspects of what people do and explaining them cross-culturally—say in an undergraduate classroom, for example—is therefore an act of translation. Teaching anthropology can be tricky because it is easy for “far out” behaviors, from the perspective of students in the classroom, to simply be left […]

Categories: Anthropology, Food, Introduction to Anthropology, Teaching • Tags: Anthropology class, cultural relativism, eating dog, food culture, Sidney Mintz, translation, uncrustables®

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Does the Market Have a Flavor?

May 3, 2010 by Museum Fatigue

Every year in my fall semester class, Development to Globalization, we begin by reading Sidney Mintz’s classic book, Sweetness and Power. The book serves as a very accessible introduction to some aspects of colonial history and the way that markets and culture interact. For the average American student who is accustomed to thinking about markets as operating according to rational economic rules and the exercise of power as an overt threat to violence, Mintz describes a different perspective. He looks […]

Categories: Random Reflections • Tags: Minnesota State Fair, Sidney Mintz, sugar

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