ABSTRACT
The peculiarity of the startling contrast between the spotless interiors of Bengali households and the heaps of household garbage consisting of food waste, fish and meat bones, and vegetable peels, dumped on the street outside them, has been described. Vedic sacrifice as performance by human and non-human actants appears above all as work, effort, and toil that produces sweat, that indexes the sacrificial labour and fervour of the sacrificer, and is offered as an oblation to Agni, the fire god. Thus, in the performance of normal food as sacrifice "like everyday", food, and the various actants it gathers to itself the kitchen, utensils, implements, refrigerator, cook, and mistress all, emerge as 'ordinarily sacred' enmeshed in myriad mixings of mixtures, collaborative networks of translations. It shows how a Bengali middle-class kitchen is ordinarily sacred. The house, kitchen, and ration shop as place-actants, and the cooks and the mistresses as person-actants also emerge as particular forms of transactionally meaningful bodies.
