Appetites

by Farquhar, Judith; Appadurai, Arjun; Comaroff, John L.

• ISBN13: 9780822329060
• ISBN10: 0822329069
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-06-01
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

Judith Farquharrs"s innovative study of medicine and popular culture in modern China reveals the thoroughly political and historical character of pleasure. Ranging over a variety of cultural terrains--fiction, medical texts, film and television, journalism, and observations of clinics and urban daily life in Beijing-Appetiteschallenges the assumption that the mundane enjoyments of bodily life are natural and unvarying. Farquhar analyzes modern Chinese reflections on embodied existence to show how contemporary appetites are grounded in history. From eating well in improving economic times to memories of the late 1950s famine, from the flavors of traditional Chinese medicine to modernityrs"s private sexual passions, this book argues that embodiment in all its forms must be invented and sustained in public reflections about personal and national life. As much at home in science studies and social theory as in the details of life in Beijing, this account uses anthropology, cultural studies, and literary criticism to read contemporary Chinese life in a materialist and reflexive mode. For both Maoist and market reform periods, this is a story of high culture in appetites, desire in collective life, and politics in the body and its dispositions.

Author Biography

Judith Farquhar is Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	1	(36)
PART I. EATING: A POLITICS OF THE SENSES
Preamble to Part I
Tireless Servant of the People	37	(10)
Lei Feng
Medicinal Meals	47	(32)
A Feast for the Mind	79	(42)
Excess and Deficiency	121	(54)
PART II. DESIRING: AN ETHICS OF EMBODIMENT
Preamble to Part II
The Rosy Glow of the Good Communist	167	(8)
Du Wanxiang
Writing the Self: The Romance of the Personal	175	(36)
Sexual Science: The Representation of Behavior	211	(32)
Ars Erotica	243	(50)
Conclusion
Hailing Historical Bodies	285	(8)
Notes	293	(30)
References	323	(14)
Index	337