The World is Dead and Cooking's Killed It: Food and the Gender of Memory in Samburu, Northern Kenya

Abstract

What is frequently construed as women's special relationship to food has provided an important entry point for gender into studies of social memory. Although such studies offer important insights into the relationship of food, femininity, and memory in the Euro-American contexts upon which they often focus, masculine aspects of food-centered memory have received far less attention, despite their importance in many non-Western settings. Focusing here on Samburu pastoralists in northern Kenya, I examine how a shift from a diet oriented around livestock products to one dominated by purchased agricultural foods forms a potent arena of collective memory, particularly in contrasting present forms of masculinity with historically validated and remembered ones. Most importantly, the new-found emphasis on cooking presented by agricultural foods, “foods of the pot,” disrupts social boundaries that are fundamental to patterns of respect that define the most masculinized of Samburu men, the age-grade of bachelor-warriors. The iconic role these historically validated forms of masculinity hold for the cultural identity of Samburu of all age-gender sectors thus means that collective memory not only becomes oriented around disruptions in food-centered gender relationships, but moreover that Samburu social memory itself becomes in a sense disproportionately masculinized.