A Pot Where Many Worlds Fit: Culinary Relations in the Andes of Northern Argentina

Abstract

Many ethnographies in the Andean region recognize the importance of the indigenous cuisine in the constitution of social relations that define groups, and the central place that commensality relations both between people and between people and other types of beings (non-humans) have in defining networks and connecting 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 emerges from these experiences is susceptible to dis-encounters 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 coexistence of different worlds – or sides of the world – that equivocations unfold leads us to appeal to the “cosmopolitical proposal” of Stengers (2005) and the possibility of “partial connections” following 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.