The close relationship between food and Italy seems unremarkable at first sight. Outside Italy, many articles and books about the country cannot seem to discuss its culture without referring to food, and the Slow Food movement, now world-wide, was born in Italy. I think that behind all these discourses and phenomena we can see the Italians' essentially social attitude towards food, an attitude perhaps behind not only Slowfood but various other social movements connected with food in Italy. But before discussing this primary concern, we must consider whether this strong relationship between food and Italy might not be just a myth, an artificial construct put together inside and outside the country, and that is the purpose of this article. So at first I unveil the processes and mechanisms behind Italian food. Then, investigating the activities of the Slow Food movement and food in everyday Italian life, I point out that in Italy people take great pleasure in eating together and even in just talking together about food. I'll suggest that this pleasure in eating together constitutes the core of the Italian attitude towards food.
There are still some points left to verify, for example considering diversity inside Italy. However I would at least like to insist that studying more deeply the significance and position of food in Italy is not only important but also useful, especially now when globalization is politicizing and commodifying food. I hope I can offer some new perspectives on the anthropology of food and eating in general to help in understanding the complex nexus of food and globalization today.

Key Words: food and eating, Italy, Slow Food, national cuisine

Danba County, in a part of the Tibetan cultural area known as rGyalrong, is located in the west of Sichuan, China, and several previously undescribed Tibetan dialects are spoken there. This article analyses phonetic aspects of Rongbrag Tibetan, one of those undescribed dialects, and provides a wordlist (ca. 1100 words). The phonetic analysis includes suprasegmentals (tones), vowels, and consonants, as well as an analysis of correspondences with Written Tibetan, in order to consider the sound changes that have taken place in Rongbrag Tibetan.

Key Words:Tibetan, Khams, rGyalrong, dialectology, phonetics

How do Palauan elders remember their experiences under the Japanese colonial regime, and how do they tell their stories to me, a young Japanese researcher?
The attitude of Palauans toward the Japanese seems benign compared to that found in other former Japanese colonies, and some exhibit a contin-ued affinity with Japan. Some Japanese regard this as evidence that Palauans welcomed and even appreciated Japanese rule; yet others feel uncomfortable, wondering at the cause of such amity despite the Japanese colonial occupa-tion.
Several historians, sociologists, political scientists and other scholars have attempted to explain pro-Japanese sentiment in Palau. However, their studies have often paid insufficient regard to the nature of oral histories, which reconstitute ‘history’ through the interaction between the history teller and the listener. In these studies, the informants' words are separated from the context and treated as a testimony which tells ‘the facts’, even though the experience of the past can be told as a variety of stories. Rather than treat-ing narratives as a bare record of events, attention should be paid to what is remembered and how it is told, to permit the interpretation of oral histories without losing sight of their fluid character.
In the Japanese colonial period, Palauan children faced discrimination as ‘islanders’; yet at the same time they were educated in the Japanese language and value system, and as ‘imperial peopl’; they were integrated into an exten-sion of the empire. How do the Palauan elders remember these experiences, and how do they recount their histories to me?
In this study, I describe the episodes reported by eight Palauan elders, analyze them and extract their messages. Then I examine how the listener influences the story-telling of the informants. Finally, I identify two remain-ing problems: firstly, that of evaluating opposing historical viewpoints, against a relativist framework thrcat treats variation as a valid result; secondly, that of transcribing oral accounts and fixing them as documents.

Key Words:Remembering Colonial Experiences, Oral History, Palau under Japanese Con-trol, Imperial People, Islanders, Education at School