[Sci-tech-public] TODAY Fri., March. 11 Sensing the Unseen @ MIT - "The Evanescent: Tasting"

[Amberly Steward]

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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