Bloomsbury The Never-ending Feast: The Anthropology and Archaeology of Feasting

About the Author Kaori OConnor is a Senior Research fellow in the Department of Anthropology at UCL, UK, author of The English Breakfast: The Biography of a National Meal (Bloomsbury, 2013) and winner of the Sophie Coe Prize for Food History (2009). Product Description Human life is a never-ending feast. Throughout history, and in all parts of the world, feasts have been the primary arena for displays of hierarchy, status and power; a stage upon which loyalties and alliances are negotiated; the occasion for the mobilization and distribution of resources, and the place where identities are created and consolidated through inclusion and exclusion. Feasting in the West in the medieval and modern periods is now well known and central to the study of culture, food and society. But there has been no broad study like this that, while grounded in anthropology and archaeology, also draws upon history and literature for an interdisciplinary look at feasting in the past, outside Europe, without which our knowledge of feasting and understanding of how our global world has been constituted is incomplete. Until now, mainstream feasting studies and food histories have concentrated on European traditions, while others equally important have been disregarded and ignored. Focusing on key periods and aspects, looking at feasting in societies not usually dealt with outside highly specialized area studies, combining theory and description, this work examines the never-ending feast in sites that include Mesopotamia, Achaemenid Persia, China, the Mongol Empire and Japan. Review "Feasting, anthropologist O'Connor (Univ. College London) argues, has received less attention but is an ideal--and universal--phenomenon that reflects key elements of social life: issues of power, status, and competition; celebrations of the sacred and secular, place and time; mobilization of people and natural resources; and much more. The author draws on textual and museum sources to write an anthropology of history that focuses on sumptuous meals, their participants, and the historical context. Six core chapters cover feasting practices from ancient to early modern times practiced by Mesopotamians, Assyrians and Achaemenid Persians, Greeks, Mongols, Chinese, and Japanese. Each case study presents detailed snapshots of historical moments illuminated by feasts understood in cultural context ... Readers are left with a clear idea of the importance of feasts in human history. Summing Up: Recommended. Most levels/libraries." - CHOICE "It's not a light read, but covers an important subject: how feasting is at the heart of human identity.Feasts were what gave meaning to an otherwise dull existence. Communities have been held together by the foods they celebrated with, from the beer and bread of Mesopotamia to the wedding meat-banquets of east Africa." --The Telegraph"Food is not only good to eat and, as Lévi-Strauss insisted, good to think with but also-to paraphrase Clausewitz-the continuation of politics by other means ... It is also perhaps more true in the past, in the glory days of empires and emperors, than today, as illustrated in Kaori O'Connor's new survey of classical feast practices ... the book is interesting not only for what it teaches about the past but also what it suggests about the applicability of anthropology to the past and not only to sites where we can do ethnography." --Jack David Eller, Anthropology Review Database"The Never-Ending Feast provides a well-rounded and engaging introduction to food studies, the feasting practices of antiquity, and their social capital for undergraduates and scholars. The images throughout the book are well chosen and reproduced, and typographical errors are minimal. The range of sources used is extensive, and O'Connor's skillful contextualization of them and the associated religious and political ideologies demonstrates the potential these 'remains' of ancient feasts have ... this text is an excellen