Bread as World: Food Habits and Social Relations in Modernizing Sardinia

This paper uses bread as a lens for analyzing contemporary social and economic change in the town of Bosa in the peripheral Italian region of Sardinia. Once men grew wheat and women baked bread together in their homes. The bread circulated through kin and friendship channels and was consumed communa...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Anthropological quarterly 1984-04, Vol.57 (2), p.47-59
Main Author: Counihan, Carole M.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Baking
Breads
Communities
Consumer economics
Food economics
Food movements
Grains
Indexing in process
Men
Social interaction
Wheat
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Summary:This paper uses bread as a lens for analyzing contemporary social and economic change in the town of Bosa in the peripheral Italian region of Sardinia. Once men grew wheat and women baked bread together in their homes. The bread circulated through kin and friendship channels and was consumed communally. Now Bosans no longer grow wheat; they buy bakery bread which is distributed according to the principles of the market place, and they consume it ever more individualistically. The paper argues that Bosa's situation is characteristic of "modernization without development", and that this leads to an increasing atomization of social relations.
ISSN:0003-5491
1534-1518
DOI:10.2307/3317579