ABSTRACT
This study investigates the relationship between culinary practices and corporeality, that is, the perceptions, representations, and uses of the body, based on the assumption that the latter is shaped by symbolic, cultural systems. From March 2011 through January 2012, an in-depth ethnographic study of five Baianas de Acarajé, traditional street food vendors in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, was conducted. These women describe how they prepare and sell acarajé as a practice involving sensory interaction with the colors, flavors, textures, and scents of the foods on both physical and emotional levels. This ability is acquired during childhood, as they listen to their mother and mimic her gestures. This mimesis, the constitution of inter-subjectivity in corporeal practices through reciprocity of perspectives, gestures, and intentions among the bodies that interact and understand one another creates an “imagistic metabolism” (Wulf, 2005) in which the “other” is internalized in the “self.” This aspect of “being a Baiana” is not promiscuous, but, rather, integral. The body is seen as an amalgam of natural and supernatural, physical and spiritual, visible and invisible elements, standing at the core of the Candomblé religion, which constitutes the root of the secular trade of acarajé.
The Baianas thus developed what Merleau-Ponty called “synesthetic perception”: a complex corporeal knowledge, where knowing and feeling are indistinguishable. Such a relation seems to be widely lost in modern times, ruled out by a “bodiless rationality.” That knowledge-feeling is part of the daily life and food labor of the Baianas.
