The Story of Pulque Part 3: Ritual and Power in Aztec Mexico
In the story of pulque, we have so far thought about different origin stories about pulque and their role in political and cultural processes in Aztec Mexico. Being linked to the origin or discovery of pulque carried a certain prestige value, but why? In many ways, pulque was not singled out, but was one of […]
Acarajé diaries. Day 6
Here, people aren’t born, says Lázaro, my tourist guide. They come up on stage. They don’t die, they have a curtain call. The paulistas in the group find this comment very amusing. But Lázaro looks like he knows what he’s talking about. He’s a painter, and our driver is a ballet dancer. We are […]
New Directions in Drinking Studies Conference, 6-7 June 2015
Our Consuming Authenticities project kicked off the papers in what would turn out to be a fantastic conference at the University of Leicester on 6-7 June. This was the New Directions in Drinking Studies conference that I mentioned in a previous post and that I have been organising with my Drinking Studies Network co-ordinator hat […]
Cooking Inauthentically: An Experiment with Flaounes
Before meeting Anna Charalambidou at the AHRC Care for the Future workshop where we developed the ideas for this research project, I had never heard of flaounes before. These are celebration Easter pies from Cyprus that Anna is investigating from the point of view of Greek Cypriot women who make them. I wanted to take […]
“London Cider”- an inauthentic compound?
Whilst researching at the National Library of Wales I came across this book from 1842 (1819): “A practical treatise on breeding, rearing, and fattening all kinds of domestic poultry, pheasants, pigeons, and rabbits” by John Lawrence who was around from 1753 until 1839. At the back of the volume there was a quite in-depth section […]
The Story of Pulque Part 2: A Tangle of Origins
In the last post, I described one of the stories about the discovery of pulque that was recorded in the 17th century and purportedly related to historical events that took place some 7 or 8 centuries previously, in the last generations of the Toltec empire. However, differing accounts of pulque’s origins circulated in pre-Columbian and […]
The Importance of Authenticity
As we outline on our project website, to designate a cultural product, like a particular food or drink, as authentic can be a politically, economically and culturally charged process, partly because the ways we think about time and history are deeply involved in this process. The slippery concept of authenticity is at the heart of […]
Introducing the Project
Consuming Authenticities is all about how history, as well as different categories of time and temporality, can be mobilised in making particular cultural products seem “authentic” – the “real” thing. The project grew out of a conversation about the workings of authenticity at a workshop designed to develop new projects that related to the AHRC’s […]
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