Please join us this Friday, March 11 for a new session of Sensing the Unseen, a seminar series to discuss current scholarship on the sensory and media modes that people employ to access realms of existence and experience outside the immediately visible.
Our talks this week will incorporate an additional sensory/participatory dimension: a tasting of artisan cheeses and pork sausage. Please join us! All seminar meetings are free and open to the public - no registration is required. The Evanescent: <http://web.mit.edu/unseen/species/evanescent.html> Tasting Friday, March 11, 2:30 - 5:00 PM @ MIT 56-114 (Whitaker Building #56 <http://whereis.mit.edu/?go=56> , Room 114) Speakers: Amy Trubek (University of Vermont), Brad Weiss (College of William & Mary) Discussants: Rachel Black (Boston University), Steven Shapin (Harvard University) Amy Trubek Tasting and Attentiveness: Nature or Culture? We eat and drink every day but how often do we taste? To taste is to pay attention to that moment when the (ostensibly) natural world enters into the human body. The sniff, the chew, the sip, the swallow. But how do we pay attention? This talk will explore taste as an aesthetic and physiological mediation between nature and culture by combining the sight, smell and taste of maple syrup and alpine cheeses. Amy Trubek is a food anthropologist, Cordon Bleu-trained cook, and Assistant Professor of Nutrition and Food Science at the University of Vermont. She is the author of The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terroir (University of California, 2008). Brad Weiss In Tastes, Lost and Found Much of the work of contemporary food activism, à la Slow Food and locavorism, is aimed at cultivating tastes. Taste, in this work, is characterized at once as a potent, embodied, perceptual capacity, and a narrative account of nostalgia, remembrance and tradition. This talk interrogates the intersection of sensibility and history manifest in current efforts to craft taste. The taste of "heritage breed" pork serves as an instructive icon in these projects. Brad Weiss is Professor of Anthropology at the College of William & Mary. An editor of the Journal of Religion in Africa for over ten years, his work examines the production of value as a symbolic, embodied, and political economic process. Weiss is the author of The Making and Unmaking of the Haya Lived World: Consumption and Commoditization in Everyday Practice (Duke University Press 1996), Sacred Trees, Bitter Harvests: Globalizing Coffee in Northwest Tanzania (Heinemann 2003), and Street Dreams and Hip Hop Barbershops: Global Fantasy in Urban Tanzania (Indiana 2009). An informal reception will be held immediately after the seminar, in room 16-220. . A Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Cultures to be held at MIT in 2010-2011, Sensing the Unseen is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and hosted by MIT Anthropology. Our website provides more details, including upcoming seminars: http://web.mit.edu/unseen/ Maps & directions to the Sensing the Unseen seminar can be found here: http://web.mit.edu/unseen/directions.html Sign up to receive email reminders about upcoming seminars: https://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/unseen_list
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