Cooking for the gods: sensuous ethnography, sensory knowledge, and the kitchen in Lucumí tradition

Abstract

This article considers the ways “sensuous ethnography” can illuminate the dynamism of embodied religious perception and behavior. It discusses the author's ethnographic research in an African-American community of Lucumí/Santería practitioners on the South Side of Chicago, and explores the sensorily attentive methodological approach adopted to engage with this house of worship, Ilé Laroye. The kitchen of Ilé Laroye became the author's main fieldwork site, and this article historicizes the kitchen in Lucumí tradition as a woman-centered space that has privileged complex forms of labor defined as generative of virtue and ritual competence. It is argued that post-sacrificial food preparation in particular has served to prepare the uninitiated for the rigors of Lucumí priesthood, and proven necessary for the internalization of dispositions and sensibilities that lead to initiation. The author contends that kitchen work has played a key role in transmitting somatic knowledge indispensable for the practice of this Afro-Cuban tradition.