Rice Talks: Food and Community in a Vietnamese Town

Rice Talks explores the importance of cooking and eating in the everyday social life of Hoi An, a properous market town in central Vietnam known for its exceptionally elaborate and sophisticated local cuisine. In a vivid and highly personal account, Nir Avieli takes the reader from the private setting of the extended family meal into the public realm of the festive, extraordinary, and unique. He shows how foodways relate to class relations, gender roles, religious practices, cosmology, ethnicity, and even local and national politics. This evocative study departs from conventional anthropological research on food by stressing the rich meanings, generative capacities, and potential subversion embedded in foodways and eating.

Author: Nir Avieli
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 04/30/2012
Pages: 344
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.10lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.00w x 1.00d
ISBN: 9780253223708

Review Citation(s):
Choice 02/01/2013

About the Author

Nir Avieli is Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ben Gurion University in Israel.