Heather Paxson
Biographic Data
| ID | 595590 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Heather Paxson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Heather |
| FAMILY NAME | Paxson |
| SIGNATURE | PAXSON H |
| AFFILIATIONS | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8429-5429 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 505 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Anthropologists Are Talking About Ecography
The `Art' And `Science' Of Handcrafting Cheese In The United States
Here is a deceptively basic recipe for making cheese: heat milk; sour it by adding bacterial cultures that convert milk sugar (lactose) to lactic acid; add an enzyme (such as rennet) to coagulate the fermenting milk. Once the milk has set into a gel-like substance, use long blades to cut the curd into pieces, separating out the watery whey Mold and salt the curds. Endless variations on this theme - from choice of goafs, sheep&s;s, or cow&s;s milk…
Eating beside Ourselves: Thresholds of Foods and Bodies
Eating beside Ourselves examines eating as a site of transfer and transformation across bodies and selves. The contributors show that by turning organic substance into food, acts of eating create interconnected food webs organized by relative conditions of edibility through which eaters may in turn become eaten. In case studies ranging from nineteenth- and twentieth-century industrial animal husbandry in the United States, biodynamic winemaking i…
Protecting Perishable Values: Timescapes of Moving Fermented Foods across Oceans and International Borders
Although it is popular to credit microbes as metabolic "laborers" responsible for producing the distinctive flavors and preservative properties of raw milk cheeses, cured meats, and assorted ferments, the fermentation value of foods can be put at risk by the material conditions and regulatory politics of international trade. Transportation and distribution are therefore today considered an aspect of and not something that follows production and v…
Don’t pack a pest”: Parts, wholes, and the porosity of food borders
Food retailers, restaurateurs and transnational families rely on continual border-crossings for the global circulation of foodstuffs. Those crossings are highly regulated. Not everything gets in. This paper provides an overview of how food safety is (unevenly) enacted at U.S. ports of entry. Where government regulators and enforcement agents perceive in certain foods danger of adulteration or contamination, importers and producers also experience…
Périls et promesses de l'abondance microbienne: Natures nouvelles et écosystèmes modèles, du fromage artisanal aux mers extraterrestres
Au cours des dernières années, la vie microbienne a été très présente dans l'actualité. Épidémies d'Escherichia coli, discussions sur les bienfaits des aliments crus et fermentés, recherches sur des formes de vie capables de vivre dans des environnements extrêmes : le modeste microbe est devenu une figure qui permet de penser les présents et les futurs possibles de la nature, au sens le plus large comme le plus étroit du terme. En partant du cons…
Re-Inventing a Tradition of Invention: Entrepreneurialism as Heritage in American Artisan Cheesemaking
Drawing on several years of ethnographic research among artisan cheesemakers, retailers and boosters in the United States. This chapter suggests that a tradition of artisanal cheesemaking locates its distinctively American heritage in an entrepreneurial sensibility. At talks given at annual meetings of the American cheese society (ACS) and in a raft of recent popular cheese books, American artisanal cheesemaking is collectively characterized by s…
Interlude: Microbiopolitics
The perils and promises of microbial abundance: Novel natures and model ecosystems, from artisanal cheese to alien seas
Microbial life has been much in the news. From outbreaks of Escherichia coli to discussions of the benefits of raw and fermented foods to recent reports of life forms capable of living in extreme environments, the modest microbe has become a figure for thinking through the presents and possible futures of nature, writ large as well as small. Noting that dominant representations of microbial life have shifted from an idiom of peril to one of promi…
The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America
The Life of Cheese is an anthropological study of American artisan cheese and the people who make it. Telling the stories of individual cheesemakers, the book explores how craftwork has become a new source of cultural and economic value within American landscapes of production and consumption. Heather Paxson’s innovative study shows how dairy farmers and artisans inhabit a world in which their colleagues and collaborators are, at various times, p…
Naming Cheese
The following essays were written by members of the Cheese Scholars Collective. Formed during a workshop held 24–26 June 2009 in Totnes, Devon, England, the Collective is dedicated to faci1itating the constructive exchange of scholarly perspectives on cheese and its makers. The short essay form of these papers is intended to allow for a more productive juxtaposition of the authors' ideas, and to better convey the array of forms their shared objec…
Placing the Taste of Vermont Cheese
This essay considers two ways in which farmstead cheesemakers in Vermont are translating the term "terroir" in order to convey the instrumental as well as gustatory values of their artisanal products. In the first, familiar from European systems of geographical indication, terroir calls attention to the material qualities of a locale that may carry through to the taste of a handmade cheese. But in the second, terroir talk offers a more prescripti…
Locating Value in Artisan Cheese: Reverse EngineeringTerroirfor New-World Landscapes
Terroir, the taste of place, is being adapted by artisan cheesemakers in the United States to reveal the range of values-agrarian, environmental, social, and gastronomic-that they believe constitute their cheese and distinguish artisan from commodity production. Some see themselves as reverse engineering terroir cheeses to create place though environmental stewardship and rural economic revitalization. But a tension is produced: while warranting …
The Gospel of Food: Everything You Think You Know about Food Is Wrong
Book Review| January 01 2009 The Gospel of Food: Everything You Think You Know about Food Is Wrong The Gospel of Food: Everything You Think You Know about Food Is Wrong. Barry Glassner. Heather Paxson Heather Paxson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Agricultural History (2009) 83 (1): 126–127. https://doi.org/10.1215/00021482-83.1.126 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer R…
Post-Pasteurian Cultures: The Microbiopolitics of Raw-Milk Cheese in the United States
Out of concern for public health, the U.S. government bans the sale of cheese made from unpasteurized milk if it is aged fewer than 60 days. But while the FDA views raw-milk cheese as a potential biohazard, riddled with pathogenic microbes, aficionados see it as the reverse: as a traditional food processed for safety by the action of good microbes. This article offers a theoretical frame for understanding the recent rise in American artisan raw-m…
Reproduction as spiritual kin work: Orthodoxy, ivf, and the moral economy of motherhood in greece
Family Planning, Human Nature, and the Ethical Subject of Sex in Urban Greece
Social survival in a postsocialist soup kitchen
With or against nature? IVF, gender and reproductive agency in Athens, Greece
The Elusive Embryo: How Men and Women Approach New Reproductive Technologies; Ideologies and Technologies of Motherhood: Race, Class, Sexuality, Nationalism
The Elusive Embryo: How Men and Women Approach New Reproductive Technologies. Gay Becker. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.x. 320 pp.Ideologies and Technologies of Motherhood: Race, Class, Sexuality, Nationalism. Heléna Ragoné and France Winddance Twine. eds. New York: Routledge, 2000. xvii. 330 pp
Rationalizing Sex: Family Planning And The Making Of Modern Lovers In Urban Greece
Family planning has been imported to Greece as a means of encouraging individuals to become modern adults by rationalizing their sexual relations and fertility-control efforts. But family-planning discourse neglects how such factors as emotion and so-alled traditional belief-including gender norms- guide people's reasonable actions. In this article, I examine how the purported gender neutrality of family-planning advocacy and its reliance on risk…
Contraception Across Cultures: Technologies, Choices, Constraints
Contraception Across Cultures: Technologies, Choices, Constraints. Andrew Russell. Elisa J. Sobo. and Mary S. Thompson. eds. Oxford: Berg, 2000. + 252 pp., figures, tables, photographs, maps, index
Demographics and Diaspora, Gender and Genealogy: Anthropological Notes on Greek Population Policy
Since World War II, Greece's birth rate has fallen into a worsening decline. With the steady emigration of Greeks throughout the century to North America, Australia, and Germany, Greece has experienced one of the most rapid population declines in Europe. In 1991, the PASOK government convened a special Parliamentary Commission to study the demographic problem and develop recommendations for its resolution. Released in 1993, and comparing Greece's…
Post-Pasteurian Cultures: The Microbiopolitics of Raw-Milk Cheese in the United States
Out of concern for public health, the U.S. government bans the sale of cheese made from unpasteurized milk if it is aged fewer than 60 days. But while the FDA views raw-milk cheese as a potential biohazard, riddled with pathogenic microbes, aficionados see it as the reverse: as a traditional food processed for safety by the action of good microbes. This article offers a theoretical frame for understanding the recent rise in American artisan raw-m…
The perils and promises of microbial abundance: Novel natures and model ecosystems, from artisanal cheese to alien seas
Microbial life has been much in the news. From outbreaks of Escherichia coli to discussions of the benefits of raw and fermented foods to recent reports of life forms capable of living in extreme environments, the modest microbe has become a figure for thinking through the presents and possible futures of nature, writ large as well as small. Noting that dominant representations of microbial life have shifted from an idiom of peril to one of promi…
Locating Value in Artisan Cheese: Reverse EngineeringTerroirfor New-World Landscapes
Terroir, the taste of place, is being adapted by artisan cheesemakers in the United States to reveal the range of values-agrarian, environmental, social, and gastronomic-that they believe constitute their cheese and distinguish artisan from commodity production. Some see themselves as reverse engineering terroir cheeses to create place though environmental stewardship and rural economic revitalization. But a tension is produced: while warranting …
The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America
The Life of Cheese is an anthropological study of American artisan cheese and the people who make it. Telling the stories of individual cheesemakers, the book explores how craftwork has become a new source of cultural and economic value within American landscapes of production and consumption. Heather Paxson’s innovative study shows how dairy farmers and artisans inhabit a world in which their colleagues and collaborators are, at various times, p…
Rationalizing Sex: Family Planning And The Making Of Modern Lovers In Urban Greece
Family planning has been imported to Greece as a means of encouraging individuals to become modern adults by rationalizing their sexual relations and fertility-control efforts. But family-planning discourse neglects how such factors as emotion and so-alled traditional belief-including gender norms- guide people's reasonable actions. In this article, I examine how the purported gender neutrality of family-planning advocacy and its reliance on risk…
Protecting Perishable Values: Timescapes of Moving Fermented Foods across Oceans and International Borders
Although it is popular to credit microbes as metabolic "laborers" responsible for producing the distinctive flavors and preservative properties of raw milk cheeses, cured meats, and assorted ferments, the fermentation value of foods can be put at risk by the material conditions and regulatory politics of international trade. Transportation and distribution are therefore today considered an aspect of and not something that follows production and v…
Périls et promesses de l'abondance microbienne: Natures nouvelles et écosystèmes modèles, du fromage artisanal aux mers extraterrestres
Au cours des dernières années, la vie microbienne a été très présente dans l'actualité. Épidémies d'Escherichia coli, discussions sur les bienfaits des aliments crus et fermentés, recherches sur des formes de vie capables de vivre dans des environnements extrêmes : le modeste microbe est devenu une figure qui permet de penser les présents et les futurs possibles de la nature, au sens le plus large comme le plus étroit du terme. En partant du cons…
Demographics and Diaspora, Gender and Genealogy: Anthropological Notes on Greek Population Policy
Since World War II, Greece's birth rate has fallen into a worsening decline. With the steady emigration of Greeks throughout the century to North America, Australia, and Germany, Greece has experienced one of the most rapid population declines in Europe. In 1991, the PASOK government convened a special Parliamentary Commission to study the demographic problem and develop recommendations for its resolution. Released in 1993, and comparing Greece's…
Naming Cheese
The following essays were written by members of the Cheese Scholars Collective. Formed during a workshop held 24–26 June 2009 in Totnes, Devon, England, the Collective is dedicated to faci1itating the constructive exchange of scholarly perspectives on cheese and its makers. The short essay form of these papers is intended to allow for a more productive juxtaposition of the authors' ideas, and to better convey the array of forms their shared objec…
With or against nature? IVF, gender and reproductive agency in Athens, Greece
Don’t pack a pest”: Parts, wholes, and the porosity of food borders
Food retailers, restaurateurs and transnational families rely on continual border-crossings for the global circulation of foodstuffs. Those crossings are highly regulated. Not everything gets in. This paper provides an overview of how food safety is (unevenly) enacted at U.S. ports of entry. Where government regulators and enforcement agents perceive in certain foods danger of adulteration or contamination, importers and producers also experience…
Anthropologists Are Talking About Ecography
Contraception Across Cultures: Technologies, Choices, Constraints
Contraception Across Cultures: Technologies, Choices, Constraints. Andrew Russell. Elisa J. Sobo. and Mary S. Thompson. eds. Oxford: Berg, 2000. + 252 pp., figures, tables, photographs, maps, index
Demographics and Diaspora, Gender and Genealogy: Anthropological Notes on Greek Population Policy
Since World War II, Greece's birth rate has fallen into a worsening decline. With the steady emigration of Greeks throughout the century to North America, Australia, and Germany, Greece has experienced one of the most rapid population declines in Europe. In 1991, the PASOK government convened a special Parliamentary Commission to study the demographic problem and develop recommendations for its resolution. Released in 1993, and comparing Greece's…
Contraception Across Cultures: Technologies, Choices, Constraints
Contraception Across Cultures: Technologies, Choices, Constraints. Andrew Russell. Elisa J. Sobo. and Mary S. Thompson. eds. Oxford: Berg, 2000. + 252 pp., figures, tables, photographs, maps, index
The Elusive Embryo: How Men and Women Approach New Reproductive Technologies; Ideologies and Technologies of Motherhood: Race, Class, Sexuality, Nationalism
The Elusive Embryo: How Men and Women Approach New Reproductive Technologies. Gay Becker. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.x. 320 pp.Ideologies and Technologies of Motherhood: Race, Class, Sexuality, Nationalism. Heléna Ragoné and France Winddance Twine. eds. New York: Routledge, 2000. xvii. 330 pp
Rationalizing Sex: Family Planning And The Making Of Modern Lovers In Urban Greece
Family planning has been imported to Greece as a means of encouraging individuals to become modern adults by rationalizing their sexual relations and fertility-control efforts. But family-planning discourse neglects how such factors as emotion and so-alled traditional belief-including gender norms- guide people's reasonable actions. In this article, I examine how the purported gender neutrality of family-planning advocacy and its reliance on risk…
With or against nature? IVF, gender and reproductive agency in Athens, Greece
Family Planning, Human Nature, and the Ethical Subject of Sex in Urban Greece
Social survival in a postsocialist soup kitchen
Reproduction as spiritual kin work: Orthodoxy, ivf, and the moral economy of motherhood in greece
Post-Pasteurian Cultures: The Microbiopolitics of Raw-Milk Cheese in the United States
Out of concern for public health, the U.S. government bans the sale of cheese made from unpasteurized milk if it is aged fewer than 60 days. But while the FDA views raw-milk cheese as a potential biohazard, riddled with pathogenic microbes, aficionados see it as the reverse: as a traditional food processed for safety by the action of good microbes. This article offers a theoretical frame for understanding the recent rise in American artisan raw-m…
The Gospel of Food: Everything You Think You Know about Food Is Wrong
Book Review| January 01 2009 The Gospel of Food: Everything You Think You Know about Food Is Wrong The Gospel of Food: Everything You Think You Know about Food Is Wrong. Barry Glassner. Heather Paxson Heather Paxson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Agricultural History (2009) 83 (1): 126–127. https://doi.org/10.1215/00021482-83.1.126 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer R…
Placing the Taste of Vermont Cheese
This essay considers two ways in which farmstead cheesemakers in Vermont are translating the term "terroir" in order to convey the instrumental as well as gustatory values of their artisanal products. In the first, familiar from European systems of geographical indication, terroir calls attention to the material qualities of a locale that may carry through to the taste of a handmade cheese. But in the second, terroir talk offers a more prescripti…
Locating Value in Artisan Cheese: Reverse EngineeringTerroirfor New-World Landscapes
Terroir, the taste of place, is being adapted by artisan cheesemakers in the United States to reveal the range of values-agrarian, environmental, social, and gastronomic-that they believe constitute their cheese and distinguish artisan from commodity production. Some see themselves as reverse engineering terroir cheeses to create place though environmental stewardship and rural economic revitalization. But a tension is produced: while warranting …
The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America
The Life of Cheese is an anthropological study of American artisan cheese and the people who make it. Telling the stories of individual cheesemakers, the book explores how craftwork has become a new source of cultural and economic value within American landscapes of production and consumption. Heather Paxson’s innovative study shows how dairy farmers and artisans inhabit a world in which their colleagues and collaborators are, at various times, p…
Naming Cheese
The following essays were written by members of the Cheese Scholars Collective. Formed during a workshop held 24–26 June 2009 in Totnes, Devon, England, the Collective is dedicated to faci1itating the constructive exchange of scholarly perspectives on cheese and its makers. The short essay form of these papers is intended to allow for a more productive juxtaposition of the authors' ideas, and to better convey the array of forms their shared objec…
The perils and promises of microbial abundance: Novel natures and model ecosystems, from artisanal cheese to alien seas
Microbial life has been much in the news. From outbreaks of Escherichia coli to discussions of the benefits of raw and fermented foods to recent reports of life forms capable of living in extreme environments, the modest microbe has become a figure for thinking through the presents and possible futures of nature, writ large as well as small. Noting that dominant representations of microbial life have shifted from an idiom of peril to one of promi…
Interlude: Microbiopolitics
Re-Inventing a Tradition of Invention: Entrepreneurialism as Heritage in American Artisan Cheesemaking
Drawing on several years of ethnographic research among artisan cheesemakers, retailers and boosters in the United States. This chapter suggests that a tradition of artisanal cheesemaking locates its distinctively American heritage in an entrepreneurial sensibility. At talks given at annual meetings of the American cheese society (ACS) and in a raft of recent popular cheese books, American artisanal cheesemaking is collectively characterized by s…
Périls et promesses de l'abondance microbienne: Natures nouvelles et écosystèmes modèles, du fromage artisanal aux mers extraterrestres
Au cours des dernières années, la vie microbienne a été très présente dans l'actualité. Épidémies d'Escherichia coli, discussions sur les bienfaits des aliments crus et fermentés, recherches sur des formes de vie capables de vivre dans des environnements extrêmes : le modeste microbe est devenu une figure qui permet de penser les présents et les futurs possibles de la nature, au sens le plus large comme le plus étroit du terme. En partant du cons…
Don’t pack a pest”: Parts, wholes, and the porosity of food borders
Food retailers, restaurateurs and transnational families rely on continual border-crossings for the global circulation of foodstuffs. Those crossings are highly regulated. Not everything gets in. This paper provides an overview of how food safety is (unevenly) enacted at U.S. ports of entry. Where government regulators and enforcement agents perceive in certain foods danger of adulteration or contamination, importers and producers also experience…
Protecting Perishable Values: Timescapes of Moving Fermented Foods across Oceans and International Borders
Although it is popular to credit microbes as metabolic "laborers" responsible for producing the distinctive flavors and preservative properties of raw milk cheeses, cured meats, and assorted ferments, the fermentation value of foods can be put at risk by the material conditions and regulatory politics of international trade. Transportation and distribution are therefore today considered an aspect of and not something that follows production and v…
Eating beside Ourselves: Thresholds of Foods and Bodies
Eating beside Ourselves examines eating as a site of transfer and transformation across bodies and selves. The contributors show that by turning organic substance into food, acts of eating create interconnected food webs organized by relative conditions of edibility through which eaters may in turn become eaten. In case studies ranging from nineteenth- and twentieth-century industrial animal husbandry in the United States, biodynamic winemaking i…
The `Art' And `Science' Of Handcrafting Cheese In The United States
Here is a deceptively basic recipe for making cheese: heat milk; sour it by adding bacterial cultures that convert milk sugar (lactose) to lactic acid; add an enzyme (such as rennet) to coagulate the fermenting milk. Once the milk has set into a gel-like substance, use long blades to cut the curd into pieces, separating out the watery whey Mold and salt the curds. Endless variations on this theme - from choice of goafs, sheep&s;s, or cow&s;s milk…
Anthropologists Are Talking About Ecography
Sociology (12 works) · Biology (9 works) · Political science (9 works) · Culinary Culture and Tourism (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (7 works) · Geography (7 works) · Art (6 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Law (6 works)