Culinary Creativity and Women’s Agency in Rural Mali: Cooking as Cultural Production

In this open access book, Stephen Wooten offers a holistic historical ethnography of cooking and female agency in North Africa, and of the broader cultural and historical significance of women’s culinary agency.

Drawing on archaeological evidence, deep historical accounts, and extensive, field-based ethnographic research, Wooten documents and theorizes Malian women’s culinary agency and creativity throughout history and its impact on their lives and lifeways of their families, communities, and society. He finds that women’s cooking in Mali not only transforms raw ingredients into cooked fare, thereby producing essential physical nourishment for women and their families, but also helps foster fundamental values and dispositions, facilitate elemental family and community dynamics, and reproduce gender identities and relations. These findings ultimately shed light on the broader issues of what food and food-production within a specific region of Africa can tell us about Africa’s culinary and cultural diversity more broadly.

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.

Stephen Wooten is an associate professor in the Department of Global Studies at the University of Oregon, a member of the UO Center for African Studies, and Director of the UO Food Studies Program. A recipient of three Fulbright awards, he has published widely across edited collections and leading journals; he is an editorial board member of the journal Food, Culture & Society; he has edited one volume, Wari Matters: Ethnographic Explorations of Money in the Made World (2006); and he has published one monograph, The Art of Livelihood: Creating Expressive Agri-Culture in Rural Mali (2009). His research covers food and culture worldwide, but with a special focus on Africa.