"Cooking" Life: An Anthropologist Blends in with Everyday Sustenance and Relationality in Sri Lanka

Food collaborates in the crafting of everyday lives, enabling transformations in intimate relationships as well as in larger socio-economic relationships and arrangements. The actual cooking and sharing of food substantiate and materialize the allegorical "cooking" of life as relational. Here, I explore the pervasiveness and agency of food by accounting for the way its cooking and sharing mediated my insertion in my fieldwork site. More specifically, I tease out the ways in which the arrangements to obtain my food involved an adaptation of multiple balances of intimacy, distance, and desire as important ingredients in the "cooking" of life. I discuss the difficulties in adjusting the amounts of ingredients in creating a concoction suitable to both my hosts and me. Indeed, in my everyday fieldwork life, food mediated the various components of our arrangements that simultaneously dealt with the moral and practical quandaries food sharing produced.

Jaar van publicatie:2013

Trefwoorden:Food, Sri Lanka