What is the connection between love and food in a non-Western society ?  Sigmund and his daughter Anna Freud drew attention to the importance of food and feeding in the development of love during the oral stage of children. However, Freud’s theory contains many hidden cultural assumptions one being the universality of Western Romantic love.   This talk examines how the Nahuat of Mexico, a culture with non-Western antecedents, represent love and food in oral narratives that include myths and folktales, testimonies, interviews and narration of dreams. While the Nahuat have been colonized by the Western world, they have retained what is apparently an indigenous concept of marital love that is deeply grounded in the reciprocal exchange of labor between a man an woman according to which the man provides the woman with the raw materials to prepare meals for her husband and children. 

James M. Taggart, is the Lewis Audenreid Professor of History and Archaeology Emeritus at Franklin and Marshall College.  His publications on love include "Remembering Victoria: A Tragic Nahuat Love Story" (Texas, 2007).  

All are welcome.

There will be drinks and the chance for a chat after the presentation.

Contact: Nils Bubandt, Research Program Director