Amita Baviskar : 4/10 : Mapping Social and Ecological Change through Food

[JC CHEN]

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Good to Eat, Good to Think: Mapping Social and Ecological Change through Food

Lecture | April 10 | 5-7 p.m. | Stephens Hall, 10 (CSAS Conf. Room)
Speaker: Amita Baviskar, Associate Professor, Institute of Economic Growth
Sponsors: Center for South Asia Studies, Blum Center for Developing Economies

In the last three decades, although India has witnessed radical shifts in the modes of producing and consuming food, this has stimulated surprisingly little analytical attention. The changing political economy of food production and consumption and its role in reshaping social identities and agrarian environments remains remarkably understudied. This lecture outlines the preliminary contours of a project that attempts to analyze some of these shifts through a selective discussion of changing food practices in post-Independence western India. It delineates the widening circuits of food as a commodity form within the home and outside, spanned by the growth of processed foods and practices of 'eating out'. It outlines the changing signification of 'food as fetish' for different social groups, and considers some potential health and ecological implications arising from the transformation.

We are privileged to have Dr. Amita Baviskar, one of India's leading scholars and thinkers, in residence at the Center for South Asia Studies in April 2012. Dr. Baviskar, an environmental sociologist who has written powerfully both on natural resources and urban sociology, is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi. Her research focuses on the cultural politics of environment and development. Her first book In the Belly of the River: Tribal Conflicts over Development in the Narmada Valley(Oxford University Press) discussed the struggle for survival by adivasis in central India against a large dam. Her subsequent work further explores the themes of resource rights, subaltern resistance and cultural identity. She has edited Waterlines: The Penguin Book of River Writings (Penguin India); Waterscapes: The Cultural Politics of a Natural Resource (Permanent Black); Contested Grounds: Essays on Nature, Culture and Power (Oxford University Press); and Elite and Everyman: The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Classes (with Raka Ray, Routledge). She is currently writing about bourgeois environmentalism and spatial restructuring in the context of economic liberalization in Delhi. Amita Baviskar has taught at the University of Delhi, and has been a visiting scholar at Stanford, Cornell, Yale and the University of California at Berkeley. She is co-editor of the journal Contributions to Indian Sociology. She was awarded the 2005 Malcolm Adiseshiah Award for Distinguished Contributions to Development Studies, the 2008 VKRV Rao Prize for Social Science Research, and the 2010 Infosys Prize for Social Sciences.

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Event Contact: 510-642-3608

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Center for South Asia Studies
University of California, Berkeley
10 Stephens Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720-2310

southasia.berkeley.edu
Tel: 510-642-3608
Fax: 510-643-5793