R Wilk
Biographic Data
| ID | 1229 |
|---|---|
| NAME | R Wilk |
| GIVEN NAMES | R |
| FAMILY NAME | Wilk |
| SIGNATURE | WILK R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Indiana University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8623-7874 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 105 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 889 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 105 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1977 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
Taking fun seriously in envisioning sustainable consumption
Ultimately, consumption drives the global economy and high levels of consumption among the wealthiest fraction of the population are responsible for a disproportionate amount of carbon emissions. Many experiences that motivate overconsumption include the pursuit of fun, a term that cuts across other conventional categories like pleasure, entertainment, leisure and play. This article surveys the scattered literature on fun and finds the concept us…
On the Nervous Edge of an Impossible Paradise
The coast of Belize has been subjected to intense tourist development.Still, the amount of development on the southern Belize coast is dwarfed by sites like Cancún and Montego Bay, or even the offshore Cays of northern Belize, Ambergris, and Caulker.Many small businesses, lodges, and restaurants continue to be locally owned and managed, there are no high-rise condos, and small-scale ecotourism still attracts many from Europe and Canada as well as…
The Caribbean
Changes in food consumption in an indigenous community in southern Belize, 1979-2019
In recent years, scholars have studied the complex social and economic transformations of Belizean Maya livelihoods resulting from the historical legacies of British and Spanish colonization and the consolidation of capitalist social relations. However, little research has considered how the pathways through which indigenous Maya households procure food are being transformed. This paper examines changes in indigenous livelihoods over time, drawin…
Transecting “healthy” and “sustainable” food in the Asia Pacific
This special issue presents a series of papers selected from those presented at a workshop held July 30 – August 1, 2018 at Yale-NUS College and the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore. We start from the assumption that changes in Asia Pacific foodways cannot be understood as simply “diffusion from the West.” The collection presents a more complex and nuanced understanding of the globalization of food, which recognizes…
Social and Political Economy
Most humans grow up in family groups of some sort and therefore get basic training in working together, sharing, and identifying as a member of a collective with a group identity. This capacity to belong seems very basic to many, a "natural" characteristic of the species. The social exchange theory used by game theorists tries to show that individual maximizing leads people to form social groups as a rational solution to real-world economic probl…
Economic Anthropology An Undisciplined Discipline
This chapter describes the early history of economic anthropology and economic philosophy. It shows how the formalist-substantivist debate, once the centerpiece of economic anthropology, has now become an obstacle instead of an inspiration. The field needs to move beyond the debate and ask more sophisticated questions. Economists, in the meantime, mostly ignored anthropology and went on with the business of advising politicians on how to run the …
Self-Interest and Neoclassical Microeconomics
This chapter outlines the intellectual history of the effort to build economics starting from the rational individual. The goal is to give a fair and balanced view of the dominant perspective in modern Western economics, to explain some of its results and conclusions, and to question why it has achieved such wide acceptance and power in the world. The chapter contains some discussion of the internal criticism of Western economics by people seekin…
The Moral Human Cultural Economics
The newspapers and magazines in the United States are full of discussions about "family values" and the collapse of public morality. People in small towns across America perceive that there is increasing family violence, teenage pregnancy, drunk driving, and handguns in the high schools. Many economists have no trouble accepting the general proposition that culture shapes human values, since economists do not pretend to explain where values come …
Conclusions Complex Economic Human Beings
In 1982, Richard Wilk began working with another anthropologist on an ethnographic project among an exotic tribe: middle-class suburbanites in Santa Cruz County, northern California. The United States was then, as now, highly dependent on foreign oil, and public utilities could no longer afford to build new nuclear power plants. The authors present fair and balanced views of three fundamentally different approaches to human behavior, arguing that…
Gifts and Exchange
This chapter offers a history of how anthropologists have looked at economic systems over time, and provides a framework-the three paradigms-for understanding how ideas of the economy connect with models of human nature. It examines that the gift giving is a good way to see all the various aspects of human nature in action at one time because gifts can be simultaneously understood as rational exchange, as a way to build political and social relat…
Economics and the Problem of Human Nature
This chapter describes that the controversy in economic anthropology has revolved around the problem of defining "economic" behavior and "the economy" as an objective set of activities and objects. It explores the debates and disagreements to expose the most basic "bedrock" positions. The chapter suggests that neither the formalist-substantivist debate nor the later theoretical trends in the discipline have generally asked the right questions. It…
Economies and Cultures
This book introduces economic anthropology to countries where it has never been taught before, including Vietnam, China, Brazil, Argentina, and Italy. It identifies the fundamental practical and theoretical problems that give economic anthropology its unique strengths and vision
Internet Privacy Hogwash
Euphemisms for the Global Other
The Tribe that Eats Its Ancestors
Academic Games
The Symposium
Concluding Thoughts and Marginal Provocations
Richard Wilk, Professor of Anthropology and Co-Director of the Indiana University Food Institute, provides final comments, placing this collection of articles on less-tasty crops nevertheless of social importance in anthropological and food studies contexts, and drawing out questions for future research
Teaching about Food, Sex and Gender in the Classroom
Teaching about Food, Sex and Gender in the Classroom: In this essay Richard Wilk shares his experience with teaching a course on food, sexuality and gender and the challenges it proved to provide during the semester: not only was finding literatureand putting the syllabus together demanding tasks, there was also a series of rather uncomfortable, affective moments in the class during the semester. Wilk presents perspectives on teaching the theme o…
Stop Pretending We Are a Meritocracy
Is Anthropology Ready for the 21st Century
Fieldwork/Fieldplay
The Estranged Siblings
Wasted
Household Archaeology
Real Belizean Food
Food and cooking can be an avenue toward understanding complex issues of cultural change and transnational cultural flow. Using examples from Belize, I discuss the transformation from late colonial times to the present in terms of hierarchies of cuisine and changes in taste. In recent Belizean history, food has been used in personal and political contexts to create a sense of the nation at the same time that increased political and economic depen…
Economies and Cultures
This book introduces economic anthropology to countries where it has never been taught before, including Vietnam, China, Brazil, Argentina, and Italy. It identifies the fundamental practical and theoretical problems that give economic anthropology its unique strengths and vision
Bottled Water
Bottled water has become a pervasive global business, and bottled water consumption continues to increase rapidly, particularly in countries where clean potable tap water is available at very low or no cost. This article discusses the ways the rich cultural meanings of water are used in marketing and branding, and the forms of consumer resistance that oppose bottled water as a commodity. The contrast between tap water and bottled water can be see…
The Archaeology of Vacant Lots in Tucson, Arizona
An archaeological survey of 17 vacant lots in Tucson, Arizona, was carried out as a student exercise. The survey disclosed evidence for a recurrent set of activities: travel from place to place, refuse disposal, storage, automobile-related uses, adult and children's play, camping, and various removal processes. Hypotheses about several formation processes, especially trampling, are provided. It is argued that vacant lots are a distinctive kind of…
The Ancient Maya and the Political Present
Can archaelogists depict the past with any accuracy, and is that their goal? Where do archaeologists' ideas come from in the first place? This paper suggests that archaeological discourse has a dual nature: at the same time that it pursues objective, verifiable knowledge about the past, it also conducts an informal and often hidden political and philosophical debate about the major issues of contemporary life. This paper investigates this second,…
Little house in the jungle
Typological Schemes and Agricultural Change
Consuming Morality
This paper addresses the close relationship between moral discourse and the practices of consumption. I suggest that moralizing about consumption is itself a phenomenon worthy of study. Further, there are a number of reasons why consumption itself inevitably raises moral issues in every culture. Finally, given urgent environmental problems, we should not seek to separate discussions of consumption from fundamental problems of justice and the comm…
A critique of desire
This paper argues that what we do not want to consume is often as personally and socially important as what we desire. Are desire and distaste really two separate bodies of knowledge; do we keep separate mental lists of good and bad, of things to be sought out and things to be avoided? Or are the positive and negative aspects of goods always intimately related to each other, so that we learn a series of relationships between desire and disgust, o…
Power at the Table
In family meals the normative and the performative are very far apart-though everyone likes to think of the family table as a place of harmony and solidarity, it is often the scene for the exercise of power and authority, a place where conflict prevails. My interest in this topic was sparked by research on middle-class parents' struggles with their 'picky eater' children. Besides narrating the way the dinner table became battleground with their o…
It's destroying a whole generation
An anthropological approach to television must transcend the limitations of traditional media scholarship by paying closer attention to the cultural and political context of the medium in different times and places. This paper explores the ways television has affected the small Caribbean country of Belize during the last ten years. It focuses attention on the way people talk about television in public and private, on the place of television in mo…
Miss Universe, the Olmec and the Valley of Oaxaca
One of the most fundamental problems in archaeology is interpreting the spatial distribution of artifacts and styles. There is a particularly long tradition of argument about the meaning of widespread art styles and artifacts assemblages, in other words, the spread of archaeological 'cultures' or 'horizon styles'. In Mesoamerica, the spread of 'Olmec' and 'Olmecoid' artifacts, ritual practices and iconography is a case that has generated many exp…
Consumption, human needs, and global environmental change
The Earliest Lowland Maya? Definition of the Swasey Phase
Recent excavations in Belize have resulted in the discovery of an earlier period of sedentary occupation than has hitherto been documented in the Maya Lowlands. The Swasey phase is stratigraphically antecedent to occupations of the early Middle Formative, the earliest horizon located until now, and associated radiocarbon dates suggest a persistence from 2000-1000 b.c./2500-1300 B.C. The ceramic and lithic material culture of the phase are describ…
Household Economy
The household in anthropology
Maclachlan, Morgan D. Editor. Household Economies and Their Transformations. Monographs in Economic Anthropology, No. 3. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America. 1987. 227 pp. including references. $25.00 cloth, $12.75 paper. Imamura, Anne E. Urban Japanese Housewives: At Home and in the Community. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. 1987. x + 191 pp. including appendix, references, and index. $18.00 cloth. Fricke, Thomas E. Himalayan Hou…
The local and the global in the political economy of beauty
Beauty pageants are an exemplar of global cultural flow, and the tensions between local and supranational production and reception of media events. This paper discusses the local history and political context of beauty pageantry in the Caribbean country of Belize. The pageants are portrayed as sites where Belizean identity is recast in a universalized language of difference and distinction. The political economy of beauty allows local production …
Beauty Queens on the Global Stage
Beauty and the feast
This article discusses two nationalizing projects in the recently independent Caribbean country of Belize. Beauty pageants, promoted by political parties as an explicit effort to build unified national consensus in a multi-ethnic society, have failed to do so. In practice they dramatize difference more than identity. In the meantime other forms of national identification have flourished, often in sites completely outside of state intervention. An…
It's about time
The Impossibility and Necessity of Re-Inquiry
Journal Article The Impossibility and Necessity of Re-Inquiry: Finding Middle Ground in Social Science Get access Richard R. Wilk Richard R. Wilk Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Journal of Consumer Research, Volume 28, Issue 2, September 2001, Pages 308-312, https://doi.org/10.1086/322905 Published: 01 September 2001
Teaching Anthropology
During the past two decades the relevance of various academic disciplines to college students has changed dramatically. In part, this is related to changing sociopolitical and economic attitudes among students about what a college education means in today's world. Also at issue, however, are fundamental changes in the way particular disciplines have met the needs of students during the past twenty years. Anthropology is one discipline that has ex…
Reflections on Orderly and Disorderly Ethnography
This paper discusses the eroding conceptual and geographic distance between research and daily life, between the home and the field. I focus in particular on the important role played by new tools and devices for recording, transforming, keeping and communicating an ever-growing corpus of information, references, images, sounds and ideas. In the process of changing the way we imagine the process of doing ethnography, and the technologies we use t…
Colonial Time and TV Time
The Maya World
The Archaeology of Vacant Lots in Tucson, Arizona
An archaeological survey of 17 vacant lots in Tucson, Arizona, was carried out as a student exercise. The survey disclosed evidence for a recurrent set of activities: travel from place to place, refuse disposal, storage, automobile-related uses, adult and children's play, camping, and various removal processes. Hypotheses about several formation processes, especially trampling, are provided. It is argued that vacant lots are a distinctive kind of…
The Earliest Lowland Maya? Definition of the Swasey Phase
Recent excavations in Belize have resulted in the discovery of an earlier period of sedentary occupation than has hitherto been documented in the Maya Lowlands. The Swasey phase is stratigraphically antecedent to occupations of the early Middle Formative, the earliest horizon located until now, and associated radiocarbon dates suggest a persistence from 2000-1000 b.c./2500-1300 B.C. The ceramic and lithic material culture of the phase are describ…
Household Archaeology
Maya Subsistence
Little house in the jungle
Households
Households
These are the proceedings of a symposium entitled Households: Changing Form and Function held at the Seven Springs Conference Center Mt. Kisco New York on October 9-15 1981. The symposium attempted to bring together anthropologists and social historians sharing a common interest in what the household does and how it works. The focus was on how and why households vary within and among societies or over time within a society. The papers are grouped…
The Household
The Ancient Maya and the Political Present
Can archaelogists depict the past with any accuracy, and is that their goal? Where do archaeologists' ideas come from in the first place? This paper suggests that archaeological discourse has a dual nature: at the same time that it pursues objective, verifiable knowledge about the past, it also conducts an informal and often hidden political and philosophical debate about the major issues of contemporary life. This paper investigates this second,…
Households
Households
Teaching Anthropology
During the past two decades the relevance of various academic disciplines to college students has changed dramatically. In part, this is related to changing sociopolitical and economic attitudes among students about what a college education means in today's world. Also at issue, however, are fundamental changes in the way particular disciplines have met the needs of students during the past twenty years. Anthropology is one discipline that has ex…
Social/Cultural Anthropology
Food and Farm
The household in anthropology
Maclachlan, Morgan D. Editor. Household Economies and Their Transformations. Monographs in Economic Anthropology, No. 3. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America. 1987. 227 pp. including references. $25.00 cloth, $12.75 paper. Imamura, Anne E. Urban Japanese Housewives: At Home and in the Community. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. 1987. x + 191 pp. including appendix, references, and index. $18.00 cloth. Fricke, Thomas E. Himalayan Hou…
Household Ecology
Development and economic change are often seen as destructive to the family and to other traditional forms of social organization. Wilk's study of household ecology reveals that the Kekchi Maya of Belize have responded by creating new forms of family organization, working together to face challenges posed by development. Not merely survivors of an ancient splendor, the Kekchi Maya build upon their rich heritage to approach such problems as ethnic…
Household Ecology, Economic Change and Domestic Life among the Kekchi Maya in Belize
Citrus, Strategy, and Class
Household Ecology
Household Economy
It's destroying a whole generation
An anthropological approach to television must transcend the limitations of traditional media scholarship by paying closer attention to the cultural and political context of the medium in different times and places. This paper explores the ways television has affected the small Caribbean country of Belize during the last ten years. It focuses attention on the way people talk about television in public and private, on the place of television in mo…
Beauty and the feast
This article discusses two nationalizing projects in the recently independent Caribbean country of Belize. Beauty pageants, promoted by political parties as an explicit effort to build unified national consensus in a multi-ethnic society, have failed to do so. In practice they dramatize difference more than identity. In the meantime other forms of national identification have flourished, often in sites completely outside of state intervention. An…
Colonial Time and TV Time
Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1648–1812 . Robert W. Patch
Sociology (60 works) · Computer Science (37 works) · History (31 works) · Library science (28 works) · Citation (26 works) · Geography (25 works) · Political science (25 works) · Archaeology (23 works) · Anthropology (21 works) · Economics (21 works)