Prof. Heather Anne Paxson

RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS:

Anthropology of Food -- Through telling the stories of American artisanal cheeses and the people who make them, The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America details the challenges of making a life and a living through artisan production. Artisanal cheeses are alive with meaning, and also with the activity of organisms large and microscopic. They are "unfinished" commodities -- living products whose qualities are not fully settled -- that embody old and new American ideas about taste, labor, and value.

Eating beside Ourselves: Thresholds of Foods and Bodies examines eating as a site of transfer and transformation across bodies and selves. Contributors to this volume examine how food and eating create thresholds for human and nonhuman relations, thresholds that mediate states of living and dying, conditions of edibility and inedibility, and relations between living organisms and their surrounding environments. Acts of eating and the process of metabolism are shown to partake in the making and unmaking of multispecies ontologies, taxonomies, and ecologies. Open Access versions available here and here.

Anthropology of Reproduction -- In the 1990s, Paxson conducted doctoral fieldwork in Athens, Greece, investigating changing ideas about motherhood and fertility control in this child-loving Mediterranean society where the abortion rate is twice the national birth rate. Making Modern Mothers: Ethics and Family Planning in Urban Greece argues that Athenian women incorporated abortion into a moral—indeed, maternal—framework, in which it may be better to interrupt a pregnancy than to raise a child inadequately. But there is more to the story. Amidst nationalist concern over declining birth rates, the increased consumption of reproductive technologies and consumer goods generates profound ambivalence in Athenians' moral evaluations of abortion, contraception, and in vitro fertilization. At stake are ideas about what it means to be Greek—or more particularly, a Greek woman or man -- in the contemporary world.