Risqué Business serves up the breastaurant industry, where food service, sex appeal, identity, and gender politics mix.Risqué Business explores the rise and ongoing cultural reckoning of “breastaurants”: sports bar–style restaurants like Hooters and Twin Peaks, which have long relied on the sexualized presentation of female servers to attract a mostly straight, male clientele. Ty Matejowsky, professor of anthropology at the Univer...

A critical meditation of the iconic 24-7 roadside chain and its place in the southern imaginaryWaffle House has long been touted as an icon of the American South. The restaurant’s consistent foregrounding as a resonant symbol of regional character proves relevant for understanding much about the people, events, and foodways shaping the sociopolitical contours of today’s Bible Belt. Whether approached as a comedic punchline on the Internet, television, and ...

Few contemporary societies remain beyond the global reach of today’s fast food industry. In both profound and subtle ways, this style of cuisine and the corporate brands that promote it have effectively transformed the appetites, health profiles, and consumer sensibilities of millions the world over. To better understand the variegated impact of McDonald’s and other national and international quick-service eateries on local life within a non-western urban context, Ty Matejowsky offers read...

Wilk and his colleagues draw upon their own international field experience to examine how food systems are changing around the globe. The authors offer a cultural perspective that is mising in other economic and developmental studies, and provide rich ethnographic data on markets, industrial production, and food economies. This new book will appeal to professionals in economic and environmental anthropology: economic development, agricultural economics, consumer behavior, nutritional scien...

Economic development is an important focus of anthropological work in rural and urban communities around the world, and in this volume the contributors offer expert analyses on the theory and practice of development. Chapters cover the key topics of market systems, agricultural knowledge, modernization, population growth, participatory development, conservation strategies, culturally sustainable development, globalization and privatization, tourism, urban development, and financial markets...

Volume 32 of REA continues the series' on-going presentation of new and highly engaging anthropological research. Chapters contained herein reflect the diverse range of broad based and localized topics economic anthropologists currently explore from various critical perspectives. Spanning deep history and present day economic processes, the contributions to this volume are subdivided into three major thematic sections. Part I addresses questions of how the political economy is articulated ...

Risqué Business serves up the breastaurant industry, where food service, sex appeal, identity, and gender politics mix.Risqué Business explores the rise and ongoing cultural reckoning of "breastaurants": sports bar–style restaurants like Hooters and Twin Peaks, which have long relied on the sexualized presentation of female servers to attract a mostly straight, male clientele. Ty Matejowsky, professor of anthropology at the Univer...

Waffle House has long been touted as an icon of the American South. The restaurant's consistent foregrounding as a resonant symbol of regional character proves relevant for understanding much about the people, events, and foodways. Whether approached as a comedic punchline on the Internet, television, and other popular media or elevated as a genuine touchstone of messy American modernity, Waffle House, its employees, and everyday clientele do much to transcend one-dimensional characterizat...

Presents ecology and current environmental studies from an anthropological point of viewThe Environment in Anthropology presents ecology and current environmental studies from an anthropological point of view. From the classics to the most current scholarship, this text connects the theory and practice in environment and anthropology, providing readers with a strong intellectual foundation as well as offering practical tools for solving environmental probl...

At no other time in history have people in wealthy countries had so much choice and so much abundance in what to eat. But in countries locked in a vicious cycle of poverty, there is no choice. There is no food.Raj Patel shows us that these two extremes are deeply and inextricably linked. In Stuffed and Starved, he asks us to think about the way our food comes to us, to understand how what we buy directly affects the world’s poorest citizens and to recognize how we ourselve...

An accessible, focused exploration of the field of political ecologyThe third edition of Political Ecology spans this sprawling field, using grounded examples and careful readings of current literature. While the study of political ecology is sometimes difficult to fathom, owing to its breadth and diversity, this resource simplifies the discussion by reducing the field down into a few core questions and arguments. These points clearly demonstrate how criti...

A myth-shattering investigation of the true cost of America's passion for finding a better bargainFrom the shuttered factories of the Rust Belt to the strip malls of the Sun Belt-and almost everywhere in between-America has been transformed by its relentless fixation on low price. This pervasive yet little- examined obsession with bargains is arguably the most powerful and devastating market force of our time, having fueled an excess of consumerism that blights our...