Kitchens are sites of creative imagination and powerful materiality. Cooking is never just about food: it entails a complex cycle of planning, shopping, storage, preparation, eating and cleaning. Moreover, kitchens are not only for cooking, but for doing tasks like studying or mending, and intimately relating to others in kinship, companionship, conflict, or isolation. Moments of tedious routine alternate with intensive celebration, between the loneliness and boredom of the cook, and the merry social gathering around a table.
Our paper explores this twofold condition of kitchen experiences by comparing two different ethnographic research contexts. On the one hand, we analyze the meanings of fire as a root metaphor in the practices and routines of everyday Spanish and French kitchens. On the other, we excavate the messiness of kitchens during carnival season in New Orleans, when the centrality of cooking is displaced by a palette of other creative and collective endeavors. The comparison points to the sensory reasons why kitchens are still such central places in our homes. As powerful places where the sensed, material world coalesces with the normative, noetic, and existential dimensions of social life, they are simultaneously “good to think with” and “good to feel.”
Keywords: ethnography; everyday; ritual; domestic space; sociality

Karina Boggio, María Cantabrana and Francisco Cruces (Institute of Health Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, Udelar; Centre of Social Experimentation and Innovation (CEIS), Faculty of Psychology, Udelar; Social and Cultural Anthropology, UNED, Spain)
What Happens in My Kitchen? A Collective Exploration Of Contemporary Reconfigurations of Intimacy From Montevideo Kitchens.

The paper is part of the research project "In Kitchens. A multisited and cross-disciplinary exploration on intimacy-making" (PI Francisco Cruces). It involves a collaborative, experimental, interdisciplinary, sensorial, and visual ethnography across six cities in America and Europe, focusing on how intimacy is produced in kitchen spaces. The project aims to document and analyze the contemporary reconfigurations of intimacy. This paper is based on fieldwork carried out in Montevideo. It focuses on the Collective exploration workshop “What happens in my kitchen?” held this year. The call invited to explore different moments in the kitchen: “First thing in the morning, the kitchen announces how the day will unfold. It may be clean from the previous dinner; it may receive the first rays of sunshine: it is ready to welcome our little rituals, like preparing mate or sitting quietly as the body fully awakens [...]”. The workshop took place over two sessions at Casa de las Ciudadanas, an NGO, and involved five middle-aged women from working-class neighborhoods. This paper presents significant emerging narratives from the workshop, analyzing their sensory experiences and their environments, the processes of constructing themselves and making sense of their world.
Keywords: intimacy, senses, in kitchens, Montevideo

Sheryl Boyle ∆ (Architecture, Carleton University, Canada) Abstract to follow