From the ancient Near East to modern-day North America, communal consumption of food and drink punctuates the rhythms of human societies. Feasts serve many social purposes, establishing alliances for war and marriage, mobilizing labor, creating political power and economic advantages, and redistributing wealth. In this collection of fifteen essays, archaeologists and ethnographers explore the material record of food and its consumption as social practice. They examine the locations of roasting pits, hearths, and refuse deposits, or the presence of special decorative ceramics, and infer ways in which feasting traditions reveal social structures of lineage, clan, moiety, and polity.
Author(s): Michael Dietler, Brian Hayden
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Year: 2010
Language: English
Pages: 444
City: Tuscaloosa
Contents
List of Illustrations
List ofTables
Contributors
1 Digesting the Feast-Good to Eat, Good to Drink, Good to Think: An Introduction • Michael Dietler and Brian Hayden
PART 1: ETHNOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVES
2 Fabulous Feasts: A Prolegomenon to the Importance of Feasting • Brian Hayden
3 Theorizing the Feast: Rituals of Consumption, Commensal Politics, and Power in African Contexts • Michael Dietler
4 Of Feasting and Value: Enga Feasts in a Historical Perspective (Papua New Guinea) • Polly Wiessner
5 Akha Feasting: An Ethnoarchaeological Perspective • Michael J Clarke
6 Polynesian Feasting in Ethnohistoric, Ethnographic, and Archaeological Contexts: A Comparison of Three Societies • Patrick V. Kirch
7 Feasting for Prosperity: A Study of Southern Northwest Coast Feasting • James R. Perodie
8 The Big Drink: Feast and Forum in the Upper Amazon • Warren R. DeBoer
9 Feasts and Labor Mobilization: Dissecting a Fundamental Economic Practice • Michael Dietler and Ingrid Herbich
PART 2: ARCHAEOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
10 The Evolution of Ritual Feasting Systems in Prehispanic Philippine Chiefdoms • Laura Lee Junker
11 Feasting and the Emergence of Platform Mound Ceremonialism in Eastern North America • Vernon James Knight
12 A Case of Ritual Feasting at the Cahokia Site • Lucretia S. Kelly
13 Feasting on the Periphery:The Production of Ritual Feasting and Village Festivals at the Ceren Site, EI Salvador • Linda A. Brown
14 Feasting in the Ancient Near East • Denise Schmandt-Besserat
15 Garbage and the Modern American Feast • Douglas C. Wilson and William L. Rathje
Index
