Bodily practices and typical cooking. The “cuisine habitus” and the “saber/sabor” of Tuluá (Colombia) traditional cookers

Abstract

This study is the result of a research fieldwork in Tuluá, Colombia, with a group of traditional cookers about their bodily practices. For this, it is analyzed the knowledge cooking of a group of women whom worked their all life as cookers, who are recognized for their typical handmaid food, showing a “cuisine habitus” as a result of an inherited culinary knowledge.

Based on an epistemic-methodological proposal funded on Merleau-Ponty and Bourdieu theory, this paper is centered on the relationship between body and cooking, identifying how this link forms identities and, at the same time, produces a tension between homogenization and innovation. The idea is to argue how those culinary practices are condition – and are conditioned by – traditional cookers embodiment.

It is identified how corporal practice on food empowers a specific habitus, which is permanently putted in action through a “practically sense” and condition every culinary handmaid dish. The thesis is that these women dispose a “saber/sabor” (“knowledge/taste”) about food, and this affects their working, familiar and social relationships.