A body set between hot and cold

Everyday sensory labor and attunement in an Indian village

Datos Bibliográficos

ID8106937
AutoresHayden S Kantor (0000-0003-4198-6980, Stanford University, autor de correspondencia)
Año2019
Volumen22
Número2
Páginas237-252
Fecha de publicación2019-03-14
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaFood Culture & Society (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1552-8014 • E-ISSN: 1751-7443
EditorialRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/15528014.2019.1573045
OpenAlexW2921617565
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas7
Referencias citadas41

In Bihar, India, rural people conceptualize the body through a humoral framework and strive to regulate the body by balancing flows of heating and cooling foods. Rural people’s sense of embodied well-being emerges not just through the sensory aspects of eating but also through the ongoing labor of preparing food and managing the body vis-à-vis the surrounding environment. An ethnographic perspective on rural foodways brings together two distinct types of labor: preparing food for consumption (labor qua labor) and attuning to foods, the body, and the surrounding environment (the labor of sensing). Yet the labor of sensing is often written out of economic accounts that privilege output and productivity. This article presents local classification systems of food to show how Biharis attune their bodies and eating habits to the time of day and season. Ideas about what constitutes a proper diet and how best to care for the body elucidate social distinctions according to class and gender. The task of winnowing cūṛā, a popular dish of flattened rice, reveals how the labor of sensing undergirds productive labor. These practices of everyday sensory labor and attunement are vital to sustaining rural livelihoods and maintaining health against the backdrop of economic precarity

Attunement · Everyday life · Political science · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Culinary Culture and Tourism · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Medicine