{"id":76060,"date":"2016-08-08T18:47:48","date_gmt":"2016-08-08T16:47:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/creating-a-new-humanities-menu-without-the-intellectual-junk-food-of-neoliberal-thought-the-conversation\/"},"modified":"2016-08-08T18:47:48","modified_gmt":"2016-08-08T16:47:48","slug":"creating-a-new-humanities-menu-without-the-intellectual-junk-food-of-neoliberal-thought-the-conversation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/creating-a-new-humanities-menu-without-the-intellectual-junk-food-of-neoliberal-thought-the-conversation\/","title":{"rendered":"Creating a new humanities menu without the intellectual junk food of neoliberal thought | The Conversation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Creating a new humanities menu without the intellectual junk food of neoliberal thought<\/a>: <\/p>\n

Hungry children stretch out their hands at a Somalian refugee camp in 2011.<\/span> Sadik Gulec\/Shutterstock<\/span><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

What are the humanities?<\/p>\n

Loosely speaking, they are academic disciplines that study how people process and document the human experience through history, philosophy, literature and cultural studies.<\/p>\n

In South Africa, a more elastic net for describing the humanities has been used. It includes the social sciences \u2013 sociology, anthropology, political studies and the like.<\/p>\n

Why study humanities?<\/p>\n

For many, this stubborn question remains unanswered notwithstanding the publication, three years ago, of two local reports on why the humanities matter. The first was issues by the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf). Controversially, it argued the humanities in South Africa were in \u201ccrisis\u201d.<\/p>\n

The second, initiated by South Africa\u2019s minister of higher education, Blade Nzimande, also made recommendations \u2013 the most controversial of which was the establishment of a government-supported National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences.<\/p>\n

Full power on display<\/h2>\n

At the recent International Symposium on Food Studies, held at the University of Pretoria, the full power of the humanities was on display. It is a real pity so few were there to see them in action.<\/p>\n

Organised by the DST-NRF Centre for Excellence in Food Security, which is jointly hosted by the universities of Pretoria and the Western Cape, the gathering hosted 43 participants from the US, France, the UK, Senegal and South Africa.<\/p>\n

If the intellectual fare was first-rate, imaginative choreography helped to make this a truly memorable conference. In one session, the conference heard a riveting theoretically rich talk on food (and its preparation) in late-modernity as the speaker was preparing \u2013 in the style of TV celebrity chef Nigella Lawson \u2013 flatbread and gazpacho!<\/p>\n

And, over dinner, participants were exposed to the secrets of the traditional South African dessert, Malva Pudding. Where did the name come from? And what is the authentic recipe for this great South African favourite?<\/p>\n

Turns out there are three plausible answers to the first question, while two recipes lay claim to authenticity \u2013 both of these were on hand to taste.<\/p>\n

Mix of disciplines<\/h2>\n

The academic presentations were drawn from a mix of disciplines \u2013 not all in the humanities. But the texture of each presentation lifted the conversation towards a shared grammar, which encouraged thinking way beyond narrow categories that invariably police disciplinary silos.<\/p>\n

There is an invaluable intellectual lesson here for interdisciplinary work in the humanities: a single topic \u2013 if it is well-chosen \u2013 can encourage disciplinary categories to overlap. But to succeed, they must have an everyday familiarity, like food, that shares a sufficient common language in which all disciplines can engage.<\/p>\n

The Pretoria event showed something more besides such generalities: talking about food is a productive way to understand a complex world.<\/p>\n

Food is the very stuff of life. And, at its core, is human sociability. Around this, myth and legend abound \u2013 although there was very little of this sentimentality in the stuffy seminar room.<\/p>\n

Instead, the kitchen was called a place of \u201charrowing intimacies\u201d; that the term \u201cCape Malay\u201d \u2013 as in \u201cCape Malay food\u201d \u2013 was a way to hide the fact that this country had experienced 176 years of slavery; and that cookbooks, for all their celebratory \u2013 not to mention scrumptious \u2013 tones, were a way of organising time.<\/p>\n

So it was that the sharper edges of the humanities \u2013 critique, deconstruction, political economy \u2013 opened orthodox \u201cfood studies\u201d to searching questions.<\/p>\n

Hunger versus food security<\/h2>\n

Why has the force of public management discourse erased the word \u201chunger\u201d from its lexicon, replacing it with the less emotionally charged term, \u201cfood security\u201d?<\/p>\n

What are we to do with a world in which starvation is often the destiny of the poor, and obesity the plight of the rich? Can we reframe all politics through the idea of \u201cfood justice\u201d which \u2013 almost everywhere \u2013 is shot through with questions around race?<\/p>\n

Tough questions, these \u2013 questions that only the humanities are licensed to ask it seems. And finding answers to them \u2013 and the many others that were tabled \u2013 requires imagination that lies beyond the regular intellectual junk food of neoliberal thought.<\/p>\n

But food \u2013 how we speak of it, how we prepare it, how we eat it \u2013 is deeply entwined both in ourselves and in our respective cultures. It is also personal, epistemological and political.<\/p>\n

This does not mean that food is not a place for cultural mixing; it certainly is \u2013 probably, it is the most successful site. But the dinner table is almost a place where the shame of poverty is most acutely experienced. It is where the vulgarity of opulence is at its most shameful.<\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly, South Africa is the exemplar of these extremes: a 2016 study by Africa Check reported that seven million South Africans reported \u201cexperiencing feeling hungry\u201d in a 2014 nationally representative survey.<\/p>\n

Against the backdrop of this horror, an accusing finger was wagged at the so-called \u201ctasting menu\u201d or menu d\u00e9gustation<\/em>. These are trendy menus that offer small portions of several dishes as an often very expensive meal. The rich of Johannesburg (and other wealthy cities) spend thousands to sample exotic cuisine, only to leave the best restaurants still hungry.<\/p>\n

Did the agronomic and economic view of food and its study yield some of their traditional hold to the humanities during the two days in Pretoria? It is much too early to say. But thanks to the humanities, a deeper conversation on a universal passion may have only just begun.<\/p>\n

\"The <\/p>\n

Peter Vale receives funding from the NRF, the University of Johannesburg and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He was co-Chair of the ASSAf Consensus Study on the Humanities.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

Source:<\/strong> The Conversation \u2013 Articles (AFRICA)<\/a><\/small>
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Creating a new humanities menu without the intellectual junk food of neoliberal thought: Hungry children stretch out their hands at a Somalian refugee camp in 2011. Sadik Gulec\/Shutterstock What are the humanities? Loosely speaking, they are academic disciplines that study how people process and document the human experience through history, philosophy, literature and cultural studies. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4584],"tags":[8890,4621,133,18756,17356,9644,13062,18757,5000,6092],"class_list":{"0":"post-76060","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-africa-news-2","7":"tag-conversation","8":"tag-creating","9":"tag-food","10":"tag-humanities","11":"tag-intellectual","12":"tag-junk","13":"tag-menu","14":"tag-neoliberal","15":"tag-thought","16":"tag-without","17":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76060","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76060"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76060\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}