Cooking Culture: Women’s Culinary Agency and Everyday Creativity in Rural Mali($39.95Value)

Description

Winner of a Gourmand Food Culture Book Award 2025 – 1st place in Africa category In this open access book, Stephen Wooten offers a holistic historical ethnography of cooking and female agency in West 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. “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, Professor of Food Studies, New York University (NYU), Author of The Migrant's Table: Meals and Memories in Bengali-American Households and The Ethnic Restaurateur “A rich, historically contextualized ethnography of the centrality of women's cooking in Mande society and lifeways. Cooking Culture offers 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 “ Cooking Culture is a masterpiece. A major contribution to food studies on the least studied continent when it comes to global knowledge of social and cultural issues surrounding food production, processing, and symbolism. Wooten uses his deep knowledge of and cultural fluency with the Mande world to unpack the complex nature of the powerful yet underappreciated space of cooking. He documents women's creative agency in literal and figurative senses. His work succeeds in showing just how many social and cultural phenomena emerge from women's day to day culinary activities. This well researched and clearly written work opens new perspectives in a neglected area in African studies and is a refreshing complement to research on food and culture across the world.” ― Kassim Kone, Professor of Anthropology at the State University of New York, Cortland and Past President of the Mande Studies Association. ““Cooking Culture” compelled me from the first pages of its preface. Drawing on his own extensive research in a Malian community, Wooten shows the creativity of rural women cooking everyday meals in ways that both reveal food studies' near-complete neglect of women's cooking practices on the entire continent and make clear their importance. He connects the neglect of food in general, and cooking in particular, to the marginalization of women and women's work, and to a profound lack of interest (in cultures across the globe) in the activities that “keep body and soul together.” His work reveals, and begins the work of remed