{"id":72423,"date":"2018-06-11T09:10:40","date_gmt":"2018-06-11T14:10:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=72423"},"modified":"2018-06-11T09:10:40","modified_gmt":"2018-06-11T14:10:40","slug":"anthony-bourdain-honorary-sociologist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2018\/06\/11\/anthony-bourdain-honorary-sociologist\/","title":{"rendered":"Anthony Bourdain, Honorary Sociologist"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was absolutely devastated to hear about Anthony Bourdain\u2019s passing. <\/span><\/p>\n

I always saw Bourdain as more than just a celebrity chef or TV host. I saw him as one of us, a sociologist of sorts, someone deeply invested in understanding and teaching about culture and community. He had a gift for teaching us about social worlds beyond our own, and making these worlds accessible. In many ways, his work accomplished what so often we as sociologists strive to do.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Photo Credit: Adam Kuban, Flickr CC<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I first read Bourdain\u2019s memoir, Kitchen Confidential<\/i><\/span><\/a>, <\/i>at the age of twenty. The gritty memoir is its own ethnography of sorts, detailing the stories, experiences, and personalities working behind the sweltering heat of the kitchen line. At the time I was struggling as a first-generation, blue-collar student suddenly immersed in one of the wealthiest college campuses in the United States. Between August and May of each academic year, I attended classes with the children of CEOs and world leaders, yet come June I returned to the kitchens of a country club in western New York, quite literally serving alumni of my college. I remember reading the book thinking \u2013 though I knew it wasn\u2019t academic sociology \u2013 \u201cwait, you can write about these things?\u201d These social worlds? These stories we otherwise overlook and ignore? I walked into my advisor\u2019s office soon after, convinced I too would write such in-depth narratives about food-related subcultures. \u201cWell,\u201d he agreed, \u201cyou could research something like food culture or alternative food movements.\u201d Within six months of that conversation, I had successfully secured my first research fellowship and taken on my first sociology project.<\/span><\/p>\n

Like his writing, Bourdain\u2019s television shows taught his audience something new about our relationships to food. Each episode of A Cook\u2019s Tour<\/i>, No Reservations<\/i>, and Parts Unknown<\/i>, went beyond the scope of a typical celebrity chef show. He never featured the World\u2019s Biggest Hamburger, nor did he ever critique foods as \u201cbizarre\u201d or \u201cstrange.\u201d Instead, he focused on what food meant to people across the globe. Food, he taught us, and the pride attached to it, are universal.<\/span><\/p>\n

Rather than projecting narratives or misappropriating words, he let people speak for themselves. He strived to show the way things really are and to treat people with the utmost dignity, yet was careful never to glamorize or romanticize poverty, struggle, or difference.\u00a0 <\/span>In one of my favorite episodes<\/span><\/a> of No Reservations<\/i>, Bourdain takes us through Peru, openly critiquing celebrities who have glorified the nation as a place to find peace and spiritual enlightenment:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Sting and all his buddies come down here, they\u2019re going on and on and on and on about preserving traditional culture, right? Because that\u2019s what we\u2019re talking about here. But what we\u2019re also talking about here is poverty. [It\u2019s] backbreaking work. Isn\u2019t it kind of patronizing to say \u2018oh they\u2019re happier, they live a simpler life closer to the soil.\u2019 Maybe so, but it\u2019s also a pretty hard, scrabbling, unglamorous life when you get down to it.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

My parents and I met Anthony Bourdain in 2009 at a bar in Buffalo where he was filming an episode of No Reservations<\/i>. My father was thrilled to tell Bourdain how much he loved the episode featuring his homeland of Colombia<\/span><\/a>. It was perhaps one of the first times in my father\u2019s 38-years in the United States that he felt like American television portrayed Colombia in a positive light, showing the beauty, resilience, and complex history of the nation rather than the images of drug wars and violence present elsewhere<\/span><\/a> in depictions of the country. That night in that dive bar, Bourdain graciously spoke with my dad about how beautiful he found the country and its people. Both the episode and their conversation filled by father with immense pride, ultimately restoring some of the dignity that had been repeatedly stripped of him through years of indignant stereotypes about his home.<\/span><\/p>\n

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In the end, isn\u2019t that what many of us sociologists are trying to do? Honor people\u2019s stories without misusing, mistreating, or misrepresenting them? <\/span><\/p>\n

In retrospect, maybe Bourdain influenced my path towards sociology. At the very least, he created a bridge between what I knew \u2013 food service \u2013 and what I wanted to know \u2013 the rest of the world.<\/span>\u00a0In our classrooms we strive to teach our students how to make these connections. Bourdain made them for us with ease, dignity, and humility.<\/p>\n

Caty Taborda-Whitt<\/a> is a Ford fellow and sociology PhD candidate at the University of Minnesota. Her research interests include embodiment, health, culture, and inequalities.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was absolutely devastated to hear about Anthony Bourdain\u2019s passing. I always saw Bourdain as more than just a celebrity chef or TV host. I saw him as one of us, a sociologist of sorts, someone deeply invested in understanding and teaching about culture and community. He had a gift for teaching us about social […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1851,"featured_media":72429,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[41,15,2124],"class_list":["post-72423","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-celebrity","tag-culture","tag-foodagriculture"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2018\/06\/14471302619_9a24950660_k-e1528726111729.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72423","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1851"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72423"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72423\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":72436,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72423\/revisions\/72436"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/72429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}