TY  - BOOK
AB  - Judith Farquhar'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--Appetites challenges 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 famine in the late 1950s, from the flavors of traditional Chinese medicine to modernity'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. -- Back cover.
AU  - Farquhar, Judith.
CN  - GT497.C6
CN  - GT497.C6
CY  - Durham, NC :
DA  - 2002.
ID  - 1374261
KW  - Human body
KW  - Food habits
KW  - Sex customs
KW  - Medicine
KW  - Anthropology, Cultural.
KW  - Feeding Behavior.
KW  - Medicine, Chinese Traditional.
KW  - Sexuality.
KW  - Corps humain
KW  - Habitudes alimentaires
KW  - Vie sexuelle
KW  - Médecine
KW  - Food habits.
KW  - Human body
KW  - Medicine.
KW  - Sex customs.
KW  - Social conditions
KW  - Lebensmittelverbrauch
KW  - Sexualität
KW  - Menselijk lichaam.
KW  - Voedingsgewoonten.
N2  - Judith Farquhar'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--Appetites challenges 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 famine in the late 1950s, from the flavors of traditional Chinese medicine to modernity'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. -- Back cover.
PB  - Duke University Press,
PP  - Durham, NC :
PY  - 2002.
SN  - 0822329069
SN  - 9780822329060
SN  - 0822329212
SN  - 9780822329213
T1  - Appetites :food and sex in postsocialist China /
TI  - Appetites :food and sex in postsocialist China /
ER  -