Being one while being many - social and culinary parts and wholes in Western Kenya

Culinary and social practices revolve around the same mereological question: How to make wholes out of parts? In the case of food, actors combine ingredients to form meals; in the case of fellow social actors, they decide with whom to form bonds. Following Lévi-Strauss' interest in what I call...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inFood, culture, & society Vol. 23; no. 4; pp. 472 - 488
Main Author Schmidt, Mario
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published London Routledge 07.08.2020
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Subjects
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Cooking
Food
Food preparation
Markets
Meals
Mereology
Social relations
sociality
structuralism
Western Kenya
Kenya
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Summary:Culinary and social practices revolve around the same mereological question: How to make wholes out of parts? In the case of food, actors combine ingredients to form meals; in the case of fellow social actors, they decide with whom to form bonds. Following Lévi-Strauss' interest in what I call "culinary mereology," this article explores structural similarities between how the inhabitants of a Western Kenyan market place cook and how they treat each other as social beings in polygamous and monogamous homesteads. In-depth discussions of ethnographic data combined with a re-reading of Lévi-Strauss' will help to understand that in Western Kenya cooking as well as establishing and maintaining social relations in homesteads through serving food rely upon mereological practices that obviate the distinction between continuous and discrete wholes in order to uphold the potential of change.
ISSN:1552-8014
1751-7443
DOI:10.1080/15528014.2020.1775410