Deciding what to eat and how to eat it are two of the most basic acts of everyday life. Yet every choice also implies a value judgement: 'good' foods versus 'bad', 'proper' and 'improper' ways of eating, and 'healthy' and 'unhealthy' bodies. These food decisions are influenced by a range of social, political and economic bioauthorities, and mediated through the individual 'eating body'. This book is unique in the cultural politics of food in its exploration of a range of such bioauthorities and in its examination of the interplay between them and the individual eating body. No matter whether they are accepted or resisted, our eating practices and preferences are shaped by, and shape, these agencies. Abbots places the body, materiality and the non-human at the heart of her analysis, interrogating not only how the individual's embodied eating practices incorporate and reject the bioauthorities of food, but also how such authorities are created by the individual act of eating. Drawing on ethnographic case studies from across the globe, The Agency of Eating provides an important analysis of the power dynamics at play in the contemporary food system and the ways in which agency is expressed and bounded. This book will be of great benefit to any with an interest in food studies, anthropology, sociology and human geography.

This book examines the ways in which lived religion in Roman Italy involved personal and communal experiences of the religious agency generated when ritualised activities caused human and more-than-human things to become bundled together into relational assemblages. Drawing upon broadly posthumanist and new materialist theories concerning the thingliness of things, it sets out to re-evaluate the role of the material world within Roman religion and to offer new perspectives on the formation of multi-scalar forms of ancient religious knowledge. It explores what happens when a materially informed approach is systematically applied to the investigation of typical questions about Roman religion such as: What did Romans understand 'religion' to mean? What did religious experiences allow people to understand about the material world and their own place within it? How were experiences of ritual connected with shared beliefs or concepts about the relationship between the mortal and divine worlds? How was divinity constructed and perceived? To answer these questions, it gathers and evaluates archaeological evidence associated with a series of case studies. Each of these focuses on a key component of the ritualised assemblages shown to have produced Roman religious agency - place, objects, bodies, and divinity - and centres on an examination of experiences of lived religion as it related to the contexts of monumentalised sanctuaries, cult instruments used in public sacrifice, anatomical votive offerings, cult images and the qualities of divinity, and magic as a situationally specific form of religious knowledge. By breaking down and then reconstructing the ritualised assemblages that generated and sustained Roman religion, this book makes the case for adopting a material approach to the study of ancient lived religion.

Critically reflecting on the interplays between food and care, this multidisciplinary volume asks 'why do individuals, institutions and agencies care about what other people eat?' It explores how acts of caring about food and eating shape and intervene in individual bodies as well as being enacted in and through those bodies. In so doing, the volume extends current critical debates regarding food and care as political mechanisms through which social hierarchies are constructed and both self and 'other' (re)produced. Addressing the ways in which eating and caring interact on multiple scales and sites - from public health and clinical settings to the market, the home and online communities - Careful Eating asks what 'eating' and 'caring' are, what relationships they create and rupture, and how their interplay is experienced in myriad spaces of everyday life. Taking account of this two-directional flow of engagement between eating and caring, the chapters are organized into three central theoretical dimensions: how eating practices mobilize discourses and forms of care; how discourses and practices of care (look to) shape particular forms of eating and food preferences; and how it is often in the bodies of individual consumers that eating and care encounter one another.

Why We Eat, How We Eat maps new terrains in thinking about relations between bodies and foods. With the central premise that food is both symbolic and material, the volume explores the intersections of current critical debates regarding how individuals eat and why they eat. Through a wide-ranging series of case studies it examines how foods and bodies both haphazardly encounter, and actively engage with, one another in ways that are simultaneously material, social, and political. The aim and uniqueness of this volume is therefore the creation of a multidisciplinary dialogue through which to produce new understandings of these encounters that may be invisible to more established paradigms. In so doing, Why We Eat, How We Eat concomitantly employs eating as a tool - a novel way of looking - while also drawing attention to the term 'eating' itself, and to the multiple ways in which it can be constituted. The volume asks what eating is - what it performs and silences, what it produces and destroys, and what it makes present and absent. It thereby traces the webs of relations and multiple scales in which eating bodies are entangled; in diverse and innovative ways, contributors demonstrate that eating draws into relationships people, places and objects that may never tangibly meet, and show how these relations are made and unmade with every mouthful. By illuminating these contemporary encounters, Why We Eat, How We Eat offers an empirically grounded richness that extends previous approaches to foods and bodies.

Critically reflecting on the interplays between food and care, this multidisciplinary volume asks 'why do individuals, institutions and agencies care about what other people eat?' It explores how acts of caring about food and eating shape and intervene in individual bodies as well as being enacted in and through those bodies. In so doing, the volume extends current critical debates regarding food and care as political mechanisms through which social hierarchies are constructed and both self and 'other' (re)produced. Addressing the ways in which eating and caring interact on multiple scales and sites - from public health and clinical settings to the market, the home and online communities - Careful Eating asks what 'eating' and 'caring' are, what relationships they create and rupture, and how their interplay is experienced in myriad spaces of everyday life. Taking account of this two-directional flow of engagement between eating and caring, the chapters are organized into three central theoretical dimensions: how eating practices mobilize discourses and forms of care; how discourses and practices of care (look to) shape particular forms of eating and food preferences; and how it is often in the bodies of individual consumers that eating and care encounter one another.

Why We Eat, How We Eat maps new terrains in thinking about relations between bodies and foods. With the central premise that food is both symbolic and material, the volume explores the intersections of current critical debates regarding how individuals eat and why they eat. Through a wide-ranging series of case studies it examines how foods and bodies both haphazardly encounter, and actively engage with, one another in ways that are simultaneously material, social, and political. The aim and uniqueness of this volume is therefore the creation of a multidisciplinary dialogue through which to produce new understandings of these encounters that may be invisible to more established paradigms. In so doing, Why We Eat, How We Eat concomitantly employs eating as a tool - a novel way of looking - while also drawing attention to the term 'eating' itself, and to the multiple ways in which it can be constituted. The volume asks what eating is - what it performs and silences, what it produces and destroys, and what it makes present and absent. It thereby traces the webs of relations and multiple scales in which eating bodies are entangled; in diverse and innovative ways, contributors demonstrate that eating draws into relationships people, places and objects that may never tangibly meet, and show how these relations are made and unmade with every mouthful. By illuminating these contemporary encounters, Why We Eat, How We Eat offers an empirically grounded richness that extends previous approaches to foods and bodies.

Ten illustrators blast off into outer space to explore the mysteries of our solar system and the galaxies and stars beyond it. Learn about everything from the Big Bang to the Moon landing, find out what makes the day light and the night dark, and discover what it really takes to be an astronaut and what everyday life is like on the International Space Station. Open the super-size flaps and let your world expand...

The horror of the puticuli, the mass burial pits, and their traditional association with the poor, has often led to this socio-economic group being viewed as somehow different to the rest of the ancient urban community in the Italy of the Late Roman Republic. This is the theory questioned by the author of this volume. Why should this part of the community care so little about the disposal of the dead when other members of society were devoting huge amounts of time and money to ensuring that the deceased received not only burial, but also lasting commemoration?

Describiria este libro como una especie de eslabon perdido entre aquellos que piensan que el tema del desarrollo personal es una ********ez y los que ya lo estan estudiando. A los que se sienten frustrados o desilusionados o tristes, solos e incomprendidos les diria que este libro es mi manera de darles un abrazo virtual. Creo que algunas de estas sensaciones nos hacen sentirnos muy solos y yo quiero explicar que nuestro dolor puede ser y es, capaz de crear vinculos muy fuertes entre la gente si sabemos como abrirnos. Desafortunadamente no es tan facil, y exploro algunos de los obstaculos que complican y frustran nuestros intentos. El dolor nos une, la rabia nos impulsa. Podremos unirnos tanto que nuestra rabia impulsada unificada nos de la oportunidad de combatir aquello que nos intenta fragmentar? Tambien exploro el tema de como puede deformarse una personalidad, el COMO soy que nos define ante los demas. Cuando sentimos alguna decepcion o trauma o rechazo, reaccionamos para protegernos, pero al hacerlo empezamos a construir una personalidad paralela o muro que nos distancia de nuestra verdadera Esencia. Protegerse no es malo, pero solemos terminar atacando como medio de defensa, a los demas y/o a nosotros mismos. Podemos desarrollar comportamientos daninos y perder la capacidad de controlar nuestros impulsos. Escribo sobre esa personalidad o "silla" que te condiciona y te entorpece y que es una carga que todos llevamos con nosotros aunque no sea visible. Es la carga que arrastramos como consecuencia de las desgracias o traumas que hayamos sufrido y que sentimos que los demas no pueden ver, que no podemos compartir porque esta vive dentro de nosotros. Esta sensacion por lo tanto nos puede llevar a tener un sentimiento profundamente arraigado de soledad. Habla de la separacion del mundo que nos rodea pero tambien ofrece de manera positiva un hombro/la mano a cualquiera que se sienta desamparada en algun momento. La ultima parte del libro aborda el tema de espiritualidad pero sin vincularse de forma abrasiva con ninguna religion en concreto. "La Silla" empieza por hablar de la oscuridad porque de ahi puede nacer algo positivo que aguante y perdure. Habla de conflictos interiores pero se desenvuelve con momentos de revelacion y crecimiento."