Splice: Gendered narratives of spices as healing

abstract

This article focuses on the uses of spice as a method of healing in selected dishes within a Durban Indian foodscape. Beyond its culinary potential (taste, flavour, seasoning), the article motivates spice as having particular utilities and meanings that have bearing upon social, cultural and gender issues pertinent to food preparation as well as consumption which ultimately influences health and well-being. Methodologically it engages conceptual insights from the critical literature on food, including its gendered parameters, and frames a description of a few pertinent dishes drawn from five interviews in a larger project on food focused on its materiality and visceral dimensions.

keywords:

• spice
• healing
• health
• gender
• women

Notes

1 The Critical Food Studies Programme is a Mellon Funded Project, undertaken in collaboration with the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), the University of the Western Cape (UWC) and the University of Pretoria (UP). This programme pursues research studies focusing on food as an analytical lens through which society, culture, the economy, and the polity is scrutinised and theorised in such areas as, for example: how food is culturally experienced, including viscerally, by taste, appetites, and desires; representation, branding and marketing of food in an increasingly food-focused commodity culture; contextual meanings of gustatory “taste”; symbolic or imaginative representations of “good food”, “cooking” and cuisine in subject-formation; food consumption in struggles for agency, social prestige or cultural or social autonomy, and the materiality of food and its visual representation in artwork, performance, and popular culture, and others.

2 Ethical clearance was provided by the Faculty of Humanities Research Ethics Committee. A semi-structured interview guide questionnaire was developed. Participants were sought by using a snowball method and use of our personal networks (age range 18 and above to 75). Interviews were also video and audio recorded. Participants agreed for their identity and names to be used.

3 See specifically chapter 3 titled ‘Spices: the pharmacology of the exotic’ (see Etkin, 2006) which emphasises the strong biocultural lens on food and culture in the role of food in health maintenance.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dhee Naidoo

DHEE NAIDOO (PhD, Public Health Medicine) is appointed as a Lecturer and Researcher in Anthropology and Development Studies at the University of Pretoria, who specialises in Medical Anthropology and issues surrounding development in terms of how behavioural, biomedical and structural factors impact on communities. Furthermore, his research interests look at Public Health and Human Rights (access to treatment and care), issues relating to gender and sexuality (also a strong LGBTI + focus), identity, and cultural interpretation of health and illness. He is also the current chairperson of the Durban LGBTI Community and Health Centre. Email: [email protected]

Vasu Reddy

VASU REDDY is Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Research and Internationalisation at the University of the Free State. He is also a research associate in the Sociology Department, University of Pretoria. He is co-principal Investigator in the Andrew Mellon-funded research programme titled Critical Food Studies with Desiree Lewis and Relebohile Moletsane. His research interests focus on genders and sexualities in order to deepen and shift conceptual and empirical arguments that centralise African feminisms, African sexualities and gender diversity from a Southern context. Email: [email protected]