Berghahn Books

Consuming the inedible; neglected dimensions of food choice.

Consumption of dirt, clay, nose mucous and other materials impacts health, of course, but it is also anthropologically, psychologically and biochemically significant. This collection of articles describes the causes of eating such substances, such as cultural requisites, scarcity and ritual as well as the effects of such consumption. Contributors survey the evidence to find who consumes the inedible, then focus on cultural perceptions of food and non-food, human identity in consumption, pica behavior, nutritive aspects of geophagia and its biological consequences, human zinc deficiency, lime as a nutritive element, non-human primate and human consumption of materials with low nutritional value, non-foods in famine, marginalized practices such as eating garbage, cannibalism as a myth and rarity, family influence and socialization, waste products used in alcoholic beverages, and the roles of cats, insects, and snot in cultured eating. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Traveling cultures, plants, and medicine; the ethnobiology and ethnopharmacy of migrations.

When people travel they take their plants and plant lore with them. In some cultures, making medicinal plants mobile is essential to survival, and nearly every culture has some sort of folk remedy they feed with a plant they would have expected to find alongside them generations ago. This collection of unique essays by experts in ethnobiology, trans-cultural pharmacy and medical anthropology analyze 12 case studies and glean the lessons learned. The studies include examples from people of the Dominican Republic and their travel to New York City with folk ways, Latino's traditional medical knowledge in the US, strategies of Indians from the Asian subcontinent as they come to the US, Swedish women and their traditional herbal remedies, Surinamese immigrants in Amsterdam, Latino migrants in London, the ethno-economy of Kurdish traditional medicine, Somalis and khat, and displacement camp medicine for the Sahrawi people in Algeria. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Where there is no midwife; birth and loss in rural india.

India has focused on family planning for decades while failing to provide sufficient maternal and neonatal health care to all women. Pinto (anthropology, Tufts U.) takes a close and sensitive look at how women from a variety of castes and communities experience infant death, their emotional responses, their dependence upon structured networks of families and friends, their perception of themselves as women of caste, and their reliance on non-institutional care. She is careful to compare those real lives with assumptions on how caste relates to care, and how that misunderstanding only makes health care less accessible and gives more names for death. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)