ABSTRACT
Anthropologists have long written about the social and cultural significance of food, including the massive symbolism surrounding food and eating. Intuition is something anthropologists employ all the time but a capacity which is itself very difficult to put into words and perhaps even more difficult to teach and communicate to students. Witness some of the reactions to so-called reflexive turn in anthropology in the mid- and late-1980's which was dismissed as self-indulgent navel gazing. Reflexive critique, skirting around the real, aesthetic appreciation and fooling around are all methods in tune with queer theory. The reflexive anthropology of the 1980's focused on the tropes and conventions that underlie the dominant realist textual tradition. Jason Throop argues that the anthropological attitude emerges out of the frustrations of ethnography and recurrent failures to understand other life worlds. Edwin Ardener made an explicit link between structural-functional models and the exclusion of women and other muted' groups from structural-functional ethnographies.
