“Cooking” Life: An Anthropologist Blends In with Everyday Sustenance and Relationality in Sri Lanka

Daele, Wim Van

doi:10.1080/07409710.2013.764788

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 15 publications

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“…Indeed, whether or not humans intervene, food transforms (itself) in multiple ways and in resonance with its environment. A growing body of anthropological work concludes that food can be considered an active collaborator in its transformation into a meal (Janeja 2010; Sutton 2014; Van Daele 2013) and, speaking of cheese making, Paxson (2013) and West (2013) urge us to consider the broader ‘ecology of production’ 10 . While I mostly concur with this view, I suggest focusing more on how a cook engages with food's transformations and knowingly directs its changing materiality towards the desired outcome (cf.…”

Section: ‘As Long As It Takes’: Temporality As a Sixth Sensementioning

confidence: 99%

Taste knowledge: couscous and the cook's six senses

Graf

2022

Royal Anthropological Inst

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In this article, I explore how cooking knowledge is constituted and show that a sense of taste is central to it. Drawing on the thick description of domestic couscous preparation in Marrakech, Morocco, I treat taste both as a multisensory form of knowing that includes a sixth sense, temporality, and as a broader set of values that inform everyday food preparation. The notion of taste knowledge highlights that there is much more to a cook's knowledge than the act of cooking, and that food and the broader environment play an active part in it. Importantly, taste knowledge only fully emerges as an activity in which past, present, and future experiences are evaluated against material and social changes. Finally, taste knowledge shows that phenomenologically inspired research allows an understanding of broader cultural, economic, and political processes and how these shape, and are shaped by, the work of low‐income, yet highly knowledgeable, women.

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Section: ‘As Long As It Takes’: Temporality As a Sixth Sensementioning

confidence: 99%

Taste knowledge: couscous and the cook's six senses

Graf

2022

Royal Anthropological Inst

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Cooking with(out) others? Changing kitchen technologies and family values in Marrakech

Graf

2022

The Journal of North African Studies

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From Haunted Houses to Housed Hauntings

Heslop¹

2022

Current Anthropology

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When sorrows come, they come not single spies. But in battalions!" (Hamlet act 4, scene 5) This paper is oriented around moments of crises and kinship ambivalence within the home of a merchant family on the outskirts of a small town in central Sri Lanka. The problems explored play out in two registers. The first outlines relations between men that become problematic and result in disharmony at home and at work, while the second deals with a situation in which the house itself becomes the site of disorder and vulnerability. Bringing fractious relationships between men into conversation with an established literature on spirit possession in South Asia, explores how families manage (haunted) houses in a way which centres around the ritual authority maha gedera. In so doing, it makes a case for the mutual interplay of relationality between people, houses, and ghosts that haunt. At another level, the article offers a critical reflection on kinship's agrarian history (and political death) in Sri Lanka and considers the stylistic predilection for interpretive narratives of possession in anthropology.

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“Cooking” Life: An Anthropologist Blends In with Everyday Sustenance and Relationality in Sri Lanka

Cited by 3 publications

References 15 publications

Taste knowledge: couscous and the cook's six senses

Taste knowledge: couscous and the cook's six senses

Cooking with(out) others? Changing kitchen technologies and family values in Marrakech

From Haunted Houses to Housed Hauntings

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