Igniting food assemblages in Sri Lanka: Ritual cooking to regenerate the world and interrelations

Food, human beings, ritual events and the world exchange components while their interaction alters their heterogeneous constitution as an assemblage. I intend to revise and vitalise assemblage theory by foregrounding the role fire plays in shaping exchange and transformation by the very process of 'cooking'. I elaborate these modifications and alchemic transformations of existing theory by exploring the ritual cooking of coconut milk and the offerings made in a harvest rite in Sri Lanka. The offerings of coconuts enable participants to transfer merits as well as to purify themselves in this surrogate self-sacrifice while reconfiguring the positions within the cosmology. The boiling over of coconut milk acts as a centripetal force around which the ritual evolves, drawing together spectators, historical origins, myths, actions and intentionalities. Heated by fire, the ritual 'cooks' these components, from which emerge renewed assemblages of the world, human beings and food. Hence, ritual cooking of food becomes an allegorical materialisation of a 'cooking' of the world and interrelationships.

Publication year:2013

Keywords:food, assemblage theory, 'cooking' life, coconut, Sri Lanka, ritual