ASFS presidential address 2018: Towards an epistemology of pleasure and a post-liberal politics of joy

ABSTRACT

At this moment of great peril for democracies across the world, scholars must not only be critical but develop affective investment in common people’s lives so as to be able to engage in the democratic process more successfully. That entails paying attention to common joys and pleasures as much as to suffering.

KEYWORDS:

• Poor people’s food
• pleasure
• theory
• suffering
• post-liberal politics
• sociology
• anthropology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Berman elaborates: “I think it’s an occupational hazard for intellectuals, regardless of their politics, to lose touch with the stuff and flow of everyday life. But this is a special problem for intellectuals on the Left, because we, among all political movements, take special pride in noticing people, respecting them, listening to their voices, caring about their needs, bringing them together, fighting for their freedom and happiness. (This is how we differ—or try to differ—from the world’s assorted ruling classes and their ideologues, who treat the people they rule as animals or machines or numbers or pieces on a chessboard, or who ignore their existence completely, or who dominate them all by playing them against each other, teaching them that they can be free and happy only at each other’s expense)” (Berman 1984, unpaginated).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Krishnendu Ray

Krishnendu Ray is the President of the Association for the Study of Food and Society (ASFS). He is also the Chair of the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at NYU. Prior to that he was a faculty member and the Associate Dean of Liberal Arts at The Culinary Institute of America. He is the author of The Migrant’s Table (2004), The Ethnic Restaurateur (2016), and the co-editor of Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food and South Asia (2012).