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Secrets from the Greek Kitchen

Online ISBN:
9780520959309
Print ISBN:
9780520280540
Publisher:
University of California Press
Book

Secrets from the Greek Kitchen

David E. Sutton
David E. Sutton
Southern Illinois University
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Published:
19 September 2014
Online ISBN:
9780520959309
Print ISBN:
9780520280540
Publisher:
University of California Press

Abstract

Secrets from the Greek Kitchen: Cooking, Skill, and Everyday Life on an Aegean Island explores the changing nature of everyday cooking practices on the Greek island of Kalymnos. It asks how cooking skills, practices, and knowledges are being reproduced or transformed, concomitant with other changes associated with contemporary life. Kalymnian islanders, both women and men, have an elaborate, shared discourse on ingredients, tastes, and recipes, and they consciously use food as a way of evoking personal and collective memory. Thus cooking knowledge, controlled mainly by women, has been a key way in which women have been socially evaluated by other women and by men. This ethnography treats the kitchen as an environment through which people move in the course of pursuing tasks, displaying skills, confronting culturally defined risks, and deploying their culturally shaped sensory abilities. On Kalymnos, cooking is much more than a mechanical chore to be executed. It is a central feature of people’s discourses and practices, which unlocks larger understandings of what is entailed in “the good life.” These larger meanings, however, can only be fully understood through a thick description that pays attention to the cutting of onions, the use of a can opener, and the rolling of phyllo dough. Through attention to these micropractices in the kitchen, I show how we can open up new perspectives on the anthropology of everyday life.

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