1st Edition
Mukbang, Food Performance, and Digital Media
Preface
Acknowledgements
Glossary
1. Overture
2. The Stage
3. The Scene
4. The Sets and Props
5. The Music and Sound
6. The Performance
7. The Audience
8. The Show
9. The Finale
Index
Mukbangers cited
Media cited
Biography
Ashley Thuthao Keng Dam is a Visiting Scholar in Anthropology at Portland State University. They are a medical anthropologist, ethnobotanist, and food writer. Their research interests lie at the intersections and overlaps of food and nutrition, global health, biocultural diversity, and media studies.
Stanley Ulijaszek is Professor Emeritus of Human Ecology at the University of Oxford. He is a nutritional anthropologist whose research encompasses the anthropology of food and eating, biocultural approaches to obesity, and the evolutionary basis for, and cultural diversity in, nutritional health.
"Mukbang, Food Performance, and Digital Media is a remarkably original account of the global digital phenomenon mukbang. Challenging dominant portrayals of mukbang as frivolous, deviant, or morally suspect, Dam and Ulijaszek reframe it as a culturally inflected food performance in which pleasure, intimacy, and transgression are staged and made meaningful in today’s digital social worlds. In doing so, the book makes a significant and timely contribution to anthropological debates on food, media, and performance in contemporary life."
-Professor Catherine Dolan, Chair, Department of Anthropology and Sociology, Deputy Head, School of Anthropology, Media and Gender, SOAS, University of London."This book places mukbang in a global context of performance, drawing on the authors’ expert knowledge of food cultures, theatre, and capitalism to highlight mukbang as an absurdist response to a world devoid of greater meaning. With a textuality that mimics a performance and engages the senses, Mukbang, Food Performance, and Digital Media evokes in the reader the same sense of fascination, disgust, and enjoyment that viewers must feel when watching mukbang."
-Tess Bird, DPhil, anthropologist, writer, and consultant.
