AAA Annual Meetings Paper, November 23, Vancouver. Session on "The Caribbeanist Anthropology of Constance R. Sutton, 2019
In “How I Learned that Motherhood Was Powerful” Constance Sutton, my mother, provides reflection... more In “How I Learned that Motherhood Was Powerful” Constance Sutton, my mother, provides reflection on the entanglement of her fieldwork in Barbados and Nigeria, her theorization of gender, and the building of her personal life, networks of kin, colleagues and friends, over the course of five decades. She describes her evolving understanding of gender and kinship built out of her experiences of motherhood in Barbados and Nigeria, which provided not just challenges to taken-for-granted Western understandings of gender held even by many feminist anthropologists at the time, but also practical lessons for constructing a life in anthropology while confronting the challenges of what was then known as the “mommy trap.” As one of the outcomes of those lessons, I reflect in this paper on how I experienced “growing up anthropological,” how some of the themes of my mother’s work were transmitted and transformed in my own anthropological interests, and how I continued the interweaving of family and fieldwork in my own family practices. In doing so, I address the concept of “changing continuities,” a phrase my mother took from her fieldwork on the Yoruba to address the contradictory nature of past and present intermingling, and which has done much to stimulate my own research on memory and historical consciousness.
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Her scholarship raised broad questions about positionality in colonial studies and challenged male-centric authorial voice in "Writing culture" more generally. She was committed to collaboration and collectivity, and to
highlighting the scholarship of working-class people, women, people of colour, Caribbean and Latin American scholars, and early students of transnational migration perspectives that have often been ignored and erased within mainstream anthropology.
In Changing Continuities, 14 of Sutton's essays are reproduced across the broad themes of Caribbeanist Anthropology, Feminism and Black Women's Power, and Transnationalism, which also include some 12 reflections
by scholars who highlight the essays' significance to their own work and to the field as a whole.
The Meaning of Cooking, by Jean-Claude Kaufmann, trans. David Macey
London: Polity, 2010
Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human, by Richard Wrangham London: Profile Books, 2009
Abstract
The three books under review here represent the recent efflorescence of diverse approaches to a previously neglected topic: the anthropology of cooking. By examining cooking through the lens of biological anthropology and differing cultural anthropological approaches, the books together make a strong case for the centrality of in-depth analysis of cooking to issues of gender, and to social change and evolutionary change. As Le ́vi-Strauss long ago recognized, this review reaffirms the notion that cooking is "good to think" about many of the topics that preoccupy our contemporary academic studies.