Cooking Culture
Product details
- ISBN 9781350382497
- Weight: 320g
- Dimensions: 152 x 232mm
- Publication Date: 30 Apr 2026
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
