Full Description
In this open access book, Stephen Wooten offers a holistic historical ethnography of cooking and female agency in West Africa, and of the broader cultural and historical significance of women's culinary agency.
Drawing on archaeological evidence, historical accounts, and extensive ethnographic research, Stephen Wooten documents and theorizes Malian women's culinary agency. He finds that their cooking not only transforms raw ingredients into cooked fare, providing essential physical nourishment, but also helps foster fundamental values, facilitate elemental family and community dynamics, and reproduce gender identities and relations. These findings shed light on the cultural productivity of cooking within a specific African context and foster a deeper appreciation for the significance of culinary dynamics more broadly. The study makes important contributions to the fields of African studies, anthropology, and "everyday studies".
The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Bloomsbury Open Collections Library Collective.
Contents
Introduction Cooking Culture: Appreciating Everyday Creativity
1 Cooking: A "Focus" for Ethnographic and Theoretical Exploration
2 The Mande World: A Deeply Rooted and Living Agri-Culture
3 Making Meals, Nourishing People
4 More than Meals: The Cultural Products of Cooking
5 Cooking Matters: Learning from the Cooks of Rural Mali
References
