Marianne E. Lien

"What 200 products can be made from a dead chicken? What should turkey really taste like? How can you make a ready-made meal appear less manufactured? How do you market a "folk-pizza"? This fascinating and entertaining book examines the strategies and struggles of the young professionals who are responsible for marketing a variety of ready-made food products for a major Norwegian food manufacturer. This setting provides the empirical focus for the analysis of the key tensions and contradictions which are to be found in modernity. Through a detailed description of "everyday-life" in the marketing department, the book critically examines many of the features which are believed to characterise modernity, such as authenticity, ambivalence and the quest for order. The setting also allows the author to explore key economic terms such as "the market", "product", "brand" and "consumer". Drawing on comparative material, the author suggests that modernity may be characterized, not so much by an effort at making order, but rather by specific ways of dealing with ambivalence, and demonstrates that features generally associated with modernity may not be so modern after all."--Bloomsbury Publishing.

"Becoming Salmon is the first ethnographic account of salmon aquaculture, the most recent turn in the human history of animal domestication. As fish are enrolled in new regimes of marine domestication, traditional distinctions between fish and animals are reconfigured, recasting farmed fish as sentient beings, capable of feeling pain and subject to animal welfare legislation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Norway and Australia, the author traces farmed Atlantic salmon through contemporary industrial practices, and shows how salmon are bred to be hungry, globally mobile, and alien in their watersheds of origin. Attentive to the economic context of industrial food production as well as the mundane practices of caring for fish, it offers novel perspectives on domestication, human-animal relations, and food production"--Provided by publisher.