A pot where many worlds fit: Culinary relations in the Andes of Northern Argentina

PAZZARELLI, FRANCISCO; LEMA, VERÓNICA

Indiana

Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut

Lugar: Berlín; Año: 2018 vol. 35 p. 271 - 296

0341-8642

Many ethnographies in the Andean region realize the importance of the indigenous cuisine in the constitution of social relations that define groups and the central place that commensality relations between people and between people with other types of beings (no-humans) have to define nets and to connect specific ?worlds?. In this ethnographic essay we consider as culinary all those relations which deal, logically and materially, with the transformation of substances and bodies that connect different beings under the general code of ingesting and commensality. Following our ethnographic research in the aboriginal community of Huachichocana, located in Jujuy, Northwestern Argentina (Southern Andes), this work reconstructs how the local culinary code is deeply interwoven with the logics of ?mutual nurturing? (crianza mutua) that bear sociality links and flows of substances between humans and non-humans. We present different situations in which the world that emerge from these experiences is susceptible to be subject to disencounters with other worlds being seen and enacted by ?outsiders? or ?insiders? of the nurturing relations, considering that these disencounters can be understood as "equivocations" (Viveiros de Castro 2004). The convivence of different worlds ?or sides of the world- that equivocations unfold, lead us to appeal to the ?cosmopolitical proposal? of I. Stengers (2005) and the possibility of ?partial connections? following M. Strathern (2004), in order to think how these disencountered worlds cohabit and collide, being at the same time necessaries to understand a phenomenon that at first glance can seem as simple as food.