Anthropology of Food

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By choosing to start your search within a database below, you can ensure that it comes from within your specific discipline or apply different filters.  Where you start searching depends on your own personal research needs and goals.

Use the relevant BU subscription databases to search for scholarly material related to your topic. This list is all databases most relevant to anthropology and food studies. It includes:

• Anthropological Fieldwork Online: This database brings the fieldwork underpinning the great ethnographies of the early 20th century into the digital world. This fully indexed, primary source database unfolds the historical development of anthropology from a global perspective, bringing together the work of early scholars who shaped the theories and methods students learn about, critique and re-shape today.
• Anthropology Online: Anthropology Online brings together written ethnographies, field notes, seminal texts, memoirs, and contemporary studies covering human behavior. It is a resource for study in the areas of politics, economics, history, psychology, environmental studies, religion, area studies, linguistics, and geography.
• AnthroSource: AnthroSource is an electronic archive of American Anthropological Association journals, newsletters and bulletins. It also provides seamless access to AAA journals archived in JSTOR.
• eHRAF World Cultures: A systematically organized collection of thousands of books and articles on cultures from all regions of the world; provides information on particular cultures, ethnic groups, or immigrant groups, their beliefs and superstitions, or subjects such as political structure, architecture, kinship units, or settlement patterns. The information is organized by cultures and ethnic groups and the full-text documents are subject-indexed at the paragraph level. It currently consists of 290 cultures.

• Oxford Food Symposium on Food and Cookery: Contains proceedings from an annual symposium to share food research by scholars, enthusiastic amateurs, writers, and chefs from around the world. Volumes of Symposia proceedings prior to the most recent five years available via Google Books and as free downloads.

• Hospitality & Tourism CompleteThis link opens in a new window: Indexes and abstracts articles and industry news on all areas of tourism and hospitality. Areas covered include: culinary arts; food and beverage management; hospitality law; hotel management, leisure and travel, market trends.

• AM Explorer AM Explorer is a cross-collection search of the entire corpus of Adam Matthew's digitized arts and cultural heritage material.

• Food and Drink in History (AM Explorer) From feast to famine, explore primary source material documenting the story of food and drink throughout history. 

• Global and Ethnic Cuisines (Food and Drink in History) This theme encompasses global cuisines and includes cookbooks published for a home readership – those that have indigenous recipes or encourage the use of local ingredients and produce – as well as those intended to introduce global cuisines to a new market. 

• Food, Race and Ethnicity (Food and Drink in History) Steeped in tradition and bound by ties of culture and community, food is often seen as central to one’s racial or ethnic identity. This theme includes cookbooks focused on the cuisines of different ethnic or national groups, as well as documents such as marketing reports and consumer studies which aim to analyse the behaviours and habits of these groups and adapt business strategies accordingly.

• Food and Gender (Food and Drink in History) Gender and food have historically been closely intertwined. Food has also been central to gender debates and used to charge causes such as women’s rights and suffrage.

• Global Commodities: Trade, Exploration & Cultural Exchange (AM Explorer) This resource brings together manuscript, printed and visual primary source materials for the study of global commodities in world history. 

• Everyday Life & Women in America (AM Explorer) Everyday Life & Women in America c.1800-1920 showcases unique primary source material for the study of American social, cultural, and popular history in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

• Trade Catalogues and the American Home (AM Explorer) Explore domestic consumerism, life and leisure in America between 1850-1950 with Trade Catalogues and the American Home. 

• J. Walter Thompson: Advertising America (AM Explorer) The J. Walter Thompson Company Archive documents the history, operation, policies and accomplishments of one of the world's largest and oldest advertising firms. The papers here reveal many aspects of twentieth-century cultural, social, business, marketing, consumer and economic history while investigating the human psyche.

• Market Research and American Business, 1935-1965 (AM Explorer)