Cooking Culture - by Stephen Wooten (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Drawing on archaeological evidence, deep historical accounts, and extensive, field-based ethnographic research, Wooten documents and theorizes Malian women's culinary agency and creativity throughout history and its impact on the lives and lifeways of their families, communities, and society"-- Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

In this open access book, Stephen Wooten offers a holistic historical ethnography of cooking and female agency in North 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.

Review Quotes

A rich, historically contextualized ethnography of the centrality of women's cooking in Mande society and lifeways. Cooking Cultureoffers an important contribution not only to the growing interest in the neglected practice of cooking in diverse contexts, but to studies of everyday life, technology, and women's agency as well. Cooking Culture furthermore provides a convincing portrayal of how "meals help produce the key values that animate culture and society: the culture of commensality, the culture of the eating circle,
and the culture of gendered action and space.
David Sutton, Southern Illinois University, author of Bigger Fish to Fry: A Theory of Cooking as Risk, With Greek Examples

Stephen Wooten's Cooking Culture correctly describes Mande food as a domain of women's agency and Mande cuisine as one of Africa's significant contributions to global material culture that is both local and diasporic. This book advocates for the authenticity of women's voices as historical and contemporaneous statements on life as lived across both time and place.
James C. McCann, Professor Emeritus of History and African Studies, Boston University, Author of Stirring the Pot: A History of African Cuisine

This book demolishes a number of ill-informed stereotypes about cooking and cuisine in Africa, by focusing on the Mande in present day Mali. By implication, it makes us rethink culinary cultures everywhere. It shows that hunger does not exhaust the rich relationship between food and precarity. Men are not the best cooks anywhere. Cooking is a subtle practice of care-giving, with deep cognitive and aesthetic resonance. And smallholder farming and market gardening feeds the world.

It makes a focussed case for thinking through the Mande material - from the plateau and the linguistic region - rather than over-generalizing in terms of "Africa" and "the Atlantic".

It is arguably the most important book I have read in Food Studies in a generation. It will be in my required readings for a number of courses.
Krishnendu Ray, NYU, USA

About the Author

Stephen Wooten is an associate professor in the Department of Global Studies at the University of Oregon, a member of the UO Center for African Studies, and Director of the UO Food Studies Program. A recipient of three Fulbright awards, he has published widely across edited collections and leading journals; he is an editorial board member of the journal Food, Culture & Society; he has edited one volume, Wari Matters: Ethnographic Explorations of Money in the Made World (2006); and he has published one monograph, The Art of Livelihood: Creating Expressive Agri-Culture in Rural Mali (2009). His research covers food and culture worldwide, but with a special focus on Africa.