Search

A discussion of the relationship between the social sciences, teaching, and culture focuses on misunderstandings about the teaching of languages. Issues examined include the nature and role of applied linguistics, the nature of teaching, the influence of educational "fashions," and implications for the training of language teachers. (MSE)

It is proposed that second language pedagogy can benefit from the perspectives on epistemology provided by Gaston Bachelard, an early twentieth-century French philosopher and psycholanalyst. (MSE)

Demonstrates the relationship between the metaphor and the language of the social sciences, with particular reference to anthropology. (AM)

Proposes a metatheoretical basis for an epistemology of linguistics. (AM)

Common language usage is considered from four perspectives: "situational" linguistics and language, "natural language," linguistic interdisciplinarity with the social sciences, and common language as a "social technology," or subject of pedagogy. (MSE)

Critiques traditional philosophical approaches to cognition and reality and compares them with contemporary notions derived from them. A position based on work of Crozier, Cazeneuve, and MacLuhan is argued for the key place of culture in explicating the universe of signs and in content and methodology of second language instruction. (AMH)

While historians have used menus to tell part of the histories of restaurants, little guidance has been provided on how we should approach these unique culinary documents. This lack of instruction becomes more apparent in light of the impressive amount of archival work and digitization of historical menus done in recent years. As a response, this article presents a method that I have developed for analyzing menus. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives as well as experience teaching and researching with menus, this method recognizes menus as documents that can reveal the many relationships and connections intersecting in, flowing through, and making up restaurants. This method is divided into four steps: 1) (Un)Identifiable details; 2) Logics/story; 3) Mess or Marginalia; and 4) Cross-Menu comparison. By moving the reader through the method and offering an example of historical menu analysis, this article demonstrates some of the many historical insights that emerge through careful consideration of these sources.

Food asset mapping is gaining prominence in Canada as an important planning tool for the evaluation of local food systems. In addition to being used by planners to identify opportunities for improved food security, food asset maps are also valuable references for sourcing food locally, particularly by people experiencing food insecurity. Seventy-three food asset maps were reviewed and categorized based on the types of food assets included as well as design characteristics. Built environment assets such as grocery stores and food banks were included in most maps, as were agriculture-based natural food assets like farms, community gardens, and orchards. However, representations of Indigenous-focussed food assets and natural food assets that are not agriculture-based, such as forests, water bodies, and foraging areas, were generally lacking. The lack of representation of Indigenous perspectives on what is considered a food asset reinforces the values of a settler-colonial food system in food asset maps. The methods for food asset mapping therefore need to be changed from current quantitative practices that largely rely on secondary data sources led by governments and non-profit organizations to collaborative approaches that centre the perspectives of Indigenous peoples and other equity deserving groups.

In Canada, the task of explaining food prices falls to a handful of grey literature reports that shape media coverage and public understanding and carry significant political and policy influence. We performed an in-depth analysis of fifty-one of these influential reports, including thirty-nine reports by Statistics Canada (including Consumer Price Index reports and other studies) and twelve reports from the Canada Food Price Report (CFPR) series. Our goal was twofold: 1) to identify and classify the various explanations given for food price changes, and 2) to evaluate the scientific rigor of these explanations. We identified 232 total explanations for food price changes, spread across seven thematic categories and thirty-two sub-categories. We find that most claims made in these reports are scientifically incomplete (only 28.6% of all claims meet established criteria for the completeness of scientific arguments). We also identify a lack of comprehensiveness in the areas of emphasis and the claims being presented and drivers being explored, particularly with respect to issues presently at the centre of food price discourse in Canada, such as the agency of grocers and other supply chain actors, corporate growth imperatives, and climate change. Considering the importance of food prices and food security to prosperity and well-being in Canada, we conclude with a series of recommendations for strengthening the scientific rigor of these reports, including greater inclusion of supporting evidence, opportunities for peer review, and increased transparency regarding conflicts of interest and funding sources.

This perspective is a continuation of a conversation started during “Reimagining Food, Food Systems, and Food Studies,” a plenary session in which we, the authors, participated at the eighteenth annual assembly of the Canadian Association for Food Studies (CAFS). Assessing current opportunities and limitations for food studies in Canada from our perspectives as emerging scholars, the CAFS panel presented our individual and collective proposals for evolving the field. This article builds on the resonances and dissonances from our discussion to craft a provisional “recipe” for reimagining food studies. Recognizing the shortcomings of the format in terms of its prescriptive connotations, we position recipes not as rigid guidelines for achieving predefined outcomes, but as creative models for generating improvisations. We begin with an overview of the ingredients that have come together to create food studies in Canada. Next, we offer some revisions in the margins of this recipe based on the work in which we are engaged as food scholars and practitioners. Finally, we consider next steps for the work of evolving the field, and we invite readers to share in this exchange. Overall, we observe and participate in an unfinished trajectory that extends from previous questions on why food studies should exist and what food studies is, to consider more deeply how food studies could be done.

“Food sovereignty,” a term conceived by peasant agriculturalists in South America, has become ubiquitous worldwide in academic and activist circles advocating for greater local control over local food. Its use has been adopted by various actors in North America, most notably by agriculturalists that tend to be small-scale, family-run, or permaculture focussed. While Indigenous food sovereignty has emerged as an adaptation of this concept, ecological, economic, social, and political opportunities and constraints in different locations across Turtle Island make its widespread application challenging, especially in contexts where communities do not want, or cannot (for a variety of reasons) eat exclusively from the land. In addition, “food sovereignty” can become a chimera in contexts where the “Crown” has absolute and final “sovereignty” over the land, which they have demonstrated through multiple enforcements across Turtle Island. Using a decolonial feminist lens within a political ecology community of practice, this paper describes and critiques current and historic framings of northern Ontario boreal forests as variously and simultaneously scarce and abundant. It also analyzes the ways that these framings have been discursively and materially constructed through colonial social, ecological, economic, and political impositions. It asks whether the concept of food sovereignty adequately challenges these constructions. Ultimately, this paper suggests that thinking about Indigenous food sovereignty as sovereignty of and through food may better describe the process, importance, and potential inherent in traditional and alternative Indigenous food harvesting and distribution practices in First Nations communities in northern Ontario, and indeed, beyond.

While Canadian policy makers are considering expanding school food programs in Canada, parents remain primarily responsible for packing lunches. Although women perform disproportionate amounts of foodwork, including feeding their children on school days, little research has investigated mothers’ experiences of packing school lunches in Canada. Drawing on 14 interviews with mothers of elementary-aged children in British Columbia, this study explored how mothers experience and make meaning of packing school lunches. Mothers described lunch packing largely as an individualized responsibility for children’s nutritional health and general wellbeing. Mothers strived to enact largely unattainable ideals about packing a “good” school lunch and engaged in diverse forms of physical, mental, and emotional labour to do so. When mothers were perceived to fall short of elusive lunch packing ideals, mothers judged themselves and other mothers, and also reported feeling scrutinized by other parents, teachers, and their children. While assuming the bulk of labour related to school lunch work, mothers also forged connections with their children through lunch packing, which they viewed as emotionally meaningful and a symbol of their care, love, and parental responsibility. These findings show that mothers’ experiences with lunch packing are complex and wrapped up in notions of “good” mothering and feeding ideals. For mothers, a “balanced” lunch requires not only a nutritionally adequate meal, but also involves balancing various forms of labour and contradictory emotions about food work. Understanding mothers’ experiences of lunch packing is pivotal for successfully developing school food programs that meet the complex expectations of Canadian families.

In this editorial, the Management Team of Canadian Food Studies / La Revue canadienne des études sur l’alimentation (CFS/RCÉA) looks back across the history of the journal and towards its future. They collectively reflect on the journal’s ethos, its range of publications, and what the future might hold in an effort to promote rigorous scholarship done differently.

In this reflexive piece, the authors consider the unexpected lessons learned while undertaking a collaborative research project with their home institution’s Indigenous Learning Centre on urban berry foraging. The faculty member questions the ethics of settlers undertaking this work, even if in collaboration with an Indigenous community, alongside the promises of this work to critical food studies. The practice of urban foraging is understood as a wider metaphor for Indigenous worldview, and for different ways of being and relating. The student’s reflections weave together themes of learning outside the classroom, with family and community, and the holistic aspects of doing research.

A growing number of women in the Canadian Prairie region are advancing into leadership roles in agriculture, which remains a predominantly male domain. In this research we explore how professionally and managerially employed women in agriculture in the provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta navigate being a leader in an industry characterized by rural hegemonic masculinity. We explore and examine the personal experiences and observations of these women regarding gender, leadership, and the current state of prairie agriculture as it grapples with being more inclusive, diverse, and equitable. We found that to gain legitimacy as a leader in agriculture women are enacting a complex mix of traditional femininity, anti-affirmative action, and masculine-coded farm credibility. Women are required to be both like a man and like a woman to differentiate themselves—both from men and from one another—as they navigate both similarity and difference in their gender performance. Expanding on the work of Mavin and Grandy’s (2016) work on respectable business femininity, we have conceptualized this performance as “respectable farm femininity” to reflect the specific experiences, and previously unexplored domain of women in agricultural leadership (outside of the on-farm contexts that make up the scholarship in this area). These expectations are rooted in more traditional constructions of rural, hegemonic masculinity, but carry important weight in conferring legitimacy to women in agricultural leadership. This has important implications for how women are able to carve out their career path on the way to leadership.

An overwhelming number of Canadians believe that a national school food program (SFP) would benefit children, but concerns around limited funding are frequently raised. SFPs across Canada are struggling to meet increasing demands due to rising food costs, meaning that food quality and quantity within existing SFPs are suffering. This paper discusses the urgency to implement a cost-shared and federally funded SFP amidst the current economic context and lack of clear direction from the federal government. The paper also explores ways in which federal funding for school meals can help to reduce the rate of chronic diseases and actualize many proven physical and mental health benefits for Canadians, all of which have positive and long-term downstream effects on the country’s economy.

A riff on the well-riffed Proust Questionnaire, the CFS Choux Questionnaire is meant to elicit a tasty and perhaps surprising experience, framed within a seemingly humble exterior. (And yes, some questions have a bit more craquelin than others.) Straightforward on their own, the queries combined start to form a celebratory pyramid of extravagance. How that composite croquembouche is assembled and taken apart, however, is up to the respondents and readers to determine. Respondents are invited to answer as many questions as they choose. The final question posed—What question would you add to this questionnaire?—prompts each respondent to incorporate their own inquisitive biome into the mix, feeding a forever renewed starter culture for future participants. For this edition, our respondent has replied to a question from Lisa Heldke (CFS Vol. 10 #2). Our Choux Questionnaire respondent for this issue is Greg de St. Maurice, an Associate Professor in Keio University’s Faculty of Business and Commerce. He holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology (University of Pittsburgh) and Master’s degrees from Oxford University, Ritsumeikan University, and American University. He served as the Vice President of ASFS from 2017 to 2022.

This article analyses a manuscript collection of recipes (ca. 1590-1643) and its context of production and use: the Oratory of Santa Maria in Vallicella in Rome. This book is at once a text, a paratext, and a notebook, and its material analysis attests to the ways in which it was produced, noting the use of manuscript sources and printed books kept in the Oratorian library, and the combination of writing and reading practices. The essay also aims to highlight the role of informal and oral routes in the dissemination of medical knowledge at the Vallicella, even emphasising the way in which care practices took place there through professional carers and the sharing of knowledge and therapeutic know-how between Oratorian priests. The aim is to assess their contribution to the formation of the collection and, ultimately, to show that the compilation of recipes was part of a wider process of circulation of medical knowledge, to be situated in a specific social and cultural milieu.

During the Army recruitment process, the body of potential soldiers were examined by medical experts looking for indications of military unsuitability. The doctors had to inspect every part of the body, including the genitals. Certain pathologies and defects were indeed considered to be incompatible with military life. While practical considerations guided this exploration, the examination also reflected a certain masculine normativity whose characteristics were entirely dictated by the specific needs of the military institution. The inspection of the reproductive organs by military doctors remained purely anatomical and did not take into account the candidate’s sexual performance or ability to reproduce. In this respect, the conception of masculinity attached to this examination differed from others. It differed from that of ordinary physicians, who routinely considered other criteria than the appearance of the genitals to define the characteristics of the male body. It also differed from that of the recruits themselves, who frequently assimilated this medical examination to a test of their sexual potency.

In our article, we analyse the image physicians presented of themselves in their professional discourse during the 19th century, to map the complex negotiation of their professional identity as, at the same time, elite, masculine, and essentially Spanish. We contrast this with the representations of physicians in the contemporary urban visual culture, in Spain and in Europe, as a space of transimperial circulation of discourses and images. Physicians strove to shape and control these representations, with limited success. Moreover, we pay attention to how colonial context shaped professional discourse. We introduce comparisons with the patterns of gendered redefinition of the medical profession in France, as this neighbouring country—which was also another global empire—was a constant point of comparison and reference for Spanish physicians, but also because French and Spanish physicians shared the same space of knowledge circulation, practices, and institutional models for centuries.

In the last centuries of the Middle Ages, reason and the faculty of judgement were at the heart of the construction of a model of masculinity promoted by clerics for the laity. While the pastoral literature and sermons produced by the mendicant friars made it imperative for men to be able to love their wives in a measured way, passionate love was as much condemned by these clerical texts as it was by the medical treatises and chapters devoted to medicine in the encyclopaedias of the thirteenth century. According to their authors, excessive love leads to madness and folly and runs counter to the model of perfection embodied by masculinity. Yet madness in love and lovesickness, as mental pathologies, are specifically assimilated to the very essence of masculinity in its physiological dispositions, and are attributed to men following the commentary of Girardus Bituricensis. This article explores this ambivalence in a dialogue between medical discourse and clerical sources.

Catalogues of medical and surgical equipment are a useful source for the social and cultural history of medicine. In particular, they provide data that can be used to examine healthcare systems and practices over a long period of time. Based on a corpus of contemporary catalogues from European manufacturers of gynaecological chairs, and focusing in particular on their visual content, this article aims to show the value of such sources for documenting the changes made to the gynaecological chair. The article also proposes to analyse the representations of objects, spaces, and care relationships as part of a gynaecological apparatus. It highlights the panoptic control and surveillance exercised over women's bodies by this apparatus. In the way it stages doctor-patient interactions, and in the absence of male bodies in the proctology and urology chairs, this apparatus appears to be a technology of gender.

Studying the role of doctors in the institution of a military-virile norm provides a better understanding of the role of medicine in the relationships of domination, subordination and marginalisation between different masculinities in France during the Napoleonic Empire. One of the aims of Napoleon’s regime was to inculcate military virility, seen as a resource for organising the reproduction of a hierarchical, militaristic society. The army’s medical staff played a specific role in this process. Their interventions helped to save wounded soldiers and prevent certain simulations, while at the same time maintaining the formation of masculinities subordinated to a valid wounded masculinity. Soldiers who had been treated and were severely disabled were still assigned the role of welfare recipients, while wounded soldiers who were still able-bodied enjoyed promotions and decorations. In both cases, medical expertise is used to fuel these promotion and pension systems by scientifically objectifying the traces of these men’s sacrifice.

Although Italian castrati did not feature prominently in the French Enlightenment, they nonetheless became a subject of scientific discussion in the kingdom insofar as they embodied a Western eunuchism. Used to explore the ethical limits of surgical procedures, musical castration was included in a number of treatises, both developed and more anecdotal, and raised a host of questions relating to bodily norms, gender identity, reproductive capacity and sexuality. This article sets out to investigate the way in which the physical and moral portrayal of castrati developed by French physicians and naturalists during the Enlightenment was part of the effort to construct and medically define sex, with a particular focus on setting standards for the masculine. In the second half of the 18th century in particular, the figure of the castrato served as a means of setting out the physical and moral characteristics of a hegemonic masculinity 'à la Française' and, consequently, the contours of a subordinate masculinity (Italian, southern, oriental) of which the singers would be the embodiment.

In September 1912, Lucien Métivet (1863-1932) published a curious cartoon in the magazine Le Rire. Known for his many satirical works, Métivet was in the habit of translating the Parisian news of his time into images. Here he brings together, in a surprising and unlikely way, medical and prophylactic references to venereal diseases and their transmission, a few news items reported in the newspapers after a rainy summer, and a social joke linked to the visit to Paris of a young foreign prince. The aim of this article is to sketch out the socio-cultural context of this press cartoon, which is seen as an object-witness to the history of medicine and French society at the beginning of the 20th century.

This article provides an example of the historical production of medical masculinity via a case study of medical practitioners in early 20th century North America within the nascent specialty of urology. By using the analytical concept of “repertoire”, it is argued that this urological masculinity was produced to advance the position of the emerging specialty and simultaneously differentiate it in the eyes of other medical practitioners, as well as to distinguish urologists from their male patients with venereal disease.

Through a study of the practices of Koglweogo self-defense groups, this article describes the ordinary violence that plagued rural Burkina Faso prior to the current armed conflict. It focuses on the forms of privatization of coercion by these armed men, particularly those that have been grafted onto economic activities and the governance of populations. Controlling the movement of people and goods, as well as the establishment of a local justice system, were already seen as central and strategic elements in the political tensions that ran through these "bush" areas, now plunged into war with jihadist groups.

Peasants and indigenous people were the main protagonists in the armed conflict in Nicaragua which ended in 1990. Even if this conflict has been “framed” as an ideological dispute that played out on the periphery during the last throes of the Cold War, the fact that it stemmed from the question of access to land became indisputable during the peace process. Today, the legacy of an unresolved agrarian situation has created new forms of conflict that result both from historical circumstances and from evolutions in the (economic and environmental) role assigned to rural areas. These transformations have an impact on the (outside and self) perception of the peasantry and the different (social and ethnic) categories that compose it.

In this paper, we analyze the forms of conflictuality and violence in territories subject to agricultural and mining extractivism, the impacts on peasant groups and the way in which resistance based on agroecology is redefined by these processes. We draw attention to gender in interlocked power relations by showing, on the one hand, how it serves the penetration of extractivist projects, by getting (male) peasants to sign up to the projects or by attacking their resistance. On the other hand, we highlight resistance centred on agroecology, the reinvestment of the care work socially assigned to female peasants, opposition and negotiations within families and politicization.

At 4 am on 8 June 2022, a group of 350 jihadists surrounded Makou, a village in the Bandiagara region. Their leader forced the inhabitants to leave. Makou's 422 households were scattered among neighbouring villages. This article analyses how the emergence of armed groups normalises violence and redraws socio-political relations in the « terroirs historiques » of central Mali. It examines how Dan Nan Ambassagou combines armed resistance against jihadist groups with peasant life in the Bandiagara region.

Argelia and Anorí are two municipalities with a predominantly peasant population; both have high levels of social and economic inequality, a problem that has been accentuated by the armed conflict in Colombia, but that is currently being addressed through local peace initiatives. This article aims at providing a critical study of what has been configured in Colombia as transition scenarios – which are constituted in a differentiated way, depending on the territorial conditions, with specific peasant territorialities. Through a relational analysis approach, it studies two peace initiatives which present themselves as an opportunity each in its own way to guarantee historical rights to the territory and the self-determination and autonomy of peasantries.

Poor, unemployed rural young men are often presumed to be inevitable victims for jihadi recruitment in the Sahel. However, from the perspective of rural populations, jihadi violence’s social reconfiguration is only the latest episode in a long series of transformations of the social environment. Youth have developed various tactics to move their lives in advantageous directions and joining jihadis is only one potential pathway. Zooming in on Mali’s southern Sikasso region, this article proposes the framework of social navigation to make sense of the diverse trajectories of rural male youth. Based on 6 months of fieldwork and interviews with stakeholders in Bamako and Sikasso, it provides a framework that unites social transformation, youth’s agency and jihadi expansion.