Global Political Economy and the Anthropology of Food

ABSTRACT Anthropologists of food have played an important role in bringing ethnographic perspectives to the collection of scholarly and political concerns that are described as “political economy,” and studies of global capitalism more generally. As a symbolically dense object that lies at the heart of social reproduction, food has proved a fertile subject for anthropologists who have sought to lend ethnographic particularity to global analyses of commodity production, distribution and consumption. Moreover, given food's intimate entanglements with regimes of gender, sexuality, race, caste and nation, anthropological studies of food and nutrition have added crucial rejoinders to economistic and class‐reductionist analyses of capitalist systems. Here, I highlight some of this disciplinary history and its key interventions, drawing particular attention to perspectives that have challenged Euro‐Western and masculinist conceptions of political economy. Looking towards the future, I consider how an anthropology of food might continue in this tradition of pushing anthropology, itself, to theorize differently.