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Feasting in Southeast Asia (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R1,733
Discovery Miles 17 330
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Feasting in Southeast Asia (Hardcover)
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Feasting has long played a crucial role in the social, political,
and economic dynamics of village life. It is far more than a
gustatory and social diversion from daily work routines: alliances
are brokered by feasts; debts are created and political battles
waged. Feasts create enormous pressure to increase the production
of food and prestige items in order to achieve the social and
political goals of their promoters. In fact, Brian Hayden argues,
the domestication of plants and animals likely resulted from such
feasting pressures. Feasting has been one of the most important
forces behind cultural change since the end of the Paleolithic era.
Feasting in Southeast Asia documents the dynamics of traditional
feasting and the ways in which a bewildering array of different
types of feasts benefits hosts. Hayden argues that people's ability
to marry, reproduce, defend themselves against threats and attacks,
and protect their interests in village politics all depend on their
ability to engage in feasting networks. To be excluded from such
networks means to be subject to attack by social predators, perhaps
even leading to enslavement. As an archaeologist, Hayden pays
specific attention to the materials involved in feasting and how
feasting might be identified and interpreted from archaeological
remains. His conclusions are based on his own ethnographic field
studies in Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and Indonesia, as well as a
comparative overview of the regional literature on feasting. Hayden
gives particular attention to the longhouses of Vietnam, an unusual
but important social unit that hosts feasts, in an attempt to
understand why they became established. This unique volume is the
culmination of fifteen years of fieldwork among tribal groups in
Southeast Asia. Until now no one has examined feasting as a general
phenomenon in Southeast Asia or tried to synthesize its underlying
dynamics from a theoretical perspective. The book will be of
interest to cultural anthropologists, archaeologists, historians,
and others involved in food studies.
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