A Remembrance of Dishes Past
Fabricating Authenticity - Jason W.M. Ellsworth
Rachel D. Brown [+]
University of Victoria
Rachel D. Brown is Program and Research Coordinator at the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society, and an Assistant Teaching Professor in Anthropology and Religion, Culture, and Society, at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. She has a Ph.D. in Religion and Culture from Wilfrid Laurier University and specializes in food, migration, lived religion, and contemporary Islam. Rachel has published multiple journal articles and book chapters on food and migration/minorities, Muslim integration in France, the experience of minority religious communities in the Pacific Northwest, and researcher positionality and knowledge production.
Description
Furthering Ellsworth’s analysis, Brown considers how David Chang in his show Ugly Delicious not only struggles with how authenticity is deployed, but at times, effectively navigates such discourses better than some academics. Brown argues that both ethnographers and cooks are constrained by the memories of a place, time, dish—memories which are often imperfect and usually impacted by various positionalities that the ethnographer/cook brings to the process.