Rice as Self: Japanese Identities through Time

Description

Are we what we eat? What does food reveal about how we live and how we think of ourselves in relation to others? And why do people have a strong attachment to their own cuisine and an aversion to the foodways of others? This title examines how people use the metaphor of a principal food in conceptualizing themselves in relation to other people.

Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney is Vilas Research Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Among her works is The Monkey as Mirror: Symbolic Transformations in Japanese History and Ritual (Princeton).

Honorable Mention for the 1993 Award for Best Professional/Scholarly Book in Sociology and Anthropology, Association of American Publishers "As in [Ohnuki-Tierney's] Monkey as Mirror, where she follows her metaphor deep into the prejudices of Japanese society, so she here finds that rice has been given a major role in historical formulation of the idea of self... Beautifully, even elegantly, presented... An important volume which traces this chosen means of identity and makes understandable the various anomalies that it would seem to have occasioned."--Donald Richie, The Japan Times "An important and timely book on the Japanese sense of self and the link to the sacredness of rice agriculture."--Drew Gerstle, The Times Higher Education Supplement