Presented by
Robert Launay, PhD

Before the age of jet travel and international hotels, travelers to foreign places might not have been able to participate in, or even understand, subjects like politics, religion, or private life. But, whatever their personal preferences, they had no choice but to eat the food, and so the authors of travel books wrote about it, from Marco Polo down to the present day. These descriptions of exotic foods tell us as much, if not more, about the authors than about the foods themselves — not only the celebrated Venetians but, for example, a French Huguenot stranded among Brazilian cannibals; a Portuguese Jesuit in Japan; a French Franciscan among the Hurons or an English buccaneer who traveled around the world jumping from ship to ship. You are not only what you eat, but also how you tell the story.

Robert Launay has a B.A. from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in social anthropology from Cambridge University. He is Professor of Anthropology at Northwestern University. He has conducted extensive field work in northern Cote d’Ivoire and West Africa. He has written two books and numerous articles on the culture and history of the region. More recently, he has been engaged in research on European understandings of non-European peoples, especially from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.

Program hosted at Roosevelt University