The Nexus Between Nutritional Anthropology and Social-Cultural Anthropology: Issues and Perspectives

Speaker: Dr. Suman CHAKRAVARTY, Department of Anthropology, Mrinalini Datta Mahavidyapith

Time: 1:00-2:30 pm

Venue: NAH114

Nutritional Anthropology is a comprehensive understanding of human food and nutrition from bio-cultural, comparative and evolutionary perspectives. Apart from its biological and ecological components, human food preferences and nutritional health outcomes are also greatly influenced by dietary choices borne from surrounding social-cultural and behavioral factors. This interrelationship between nutritional anthropology and social-cultural anthropology is historically quite significant. Many cross-cultural qualitative ethnographic evaluations have been done in order to understand the human behavior related to food and nutrition, which enrich the theoretical orientation of nutritional anthropology from ecological, materialistic, ideological, symbolic, socio-political and religious perspectives. A current concern in nutritional anthropology is the study of dietary transitions, and examines the impact of globalization, modernization, delocalization of energy resources and industrialization specifically in South and Southeast Asia and the Asia-Pacific region. I will mainly explore in this talk how socio-cultural anthropological theories and methods related to nutritional anthropology can contribute to the understanding of the present scenario of food and nutritional problems in Asian countries.

Dr Suman Chakravarty is Assistant Professor and Head at the Department of Anthropology. and coordinator of the Department of Food and Nutrition in Mrinalini Datta Mahavidyapith, a Government-Aided undergraduate degree College under West Bengal State University, India. He received his Bachelors’, Master’s and PhD degrees in Anthropology from the University of Calcutta, India.

ALL INTERESTED ARE WELCOME