A body set between hot and cold: everyday sensory labor and attunement in an Indian village

ABSTRACT

In Bihar, India, rural people conceptualize the body through a humoral framework and strive to regulate the body by balancing flows of heating and cooling foods. Rural people’s sense of embodied well-being emerges not just through the sensory aspects of eating but also through the ongoing labor of preparing food and managing the body vis-à-vis the surrounding environment. An ethnographic perspective on rural foodways brings together two distinct types of labor: preparing food for consumption (labor qua labor) and attuning to foods, the body, and the surrounding environment (the labor of sensing). Yet the labor of sensing is often written out of economic accounts that privilege output and productivity. This article presents local classification systems of food to show how Biharis attune their bodies and eating habits to the time of day and season. Ideas about what constitutes a proper diet and how best to care for the body elucidate social distinctions according to class and gender. The task of winnowing cūṛā, a popular dish of flattened rice, reveals how the labor of sensing undergirds productive labor. These practices of everyday sensory labor and attunement are vital to sustaining rural livelihoods and maintaining health against the backdrop of economic precarity.

KEYWORDS:

• Food
• sensory labor
• attunement
• embodiment
• humoral frameworks
• rural life
• India

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the people in Bihar who welcomed me into their lives and shared their experiences with me. I thank Stacey Langwick, Ann Gold, Durba Ghosh, Andrew Willford, Amita Baviskar, Jessica Barnes, Harris Solomon, Sarah Pinto, and Roanne Kantor for their critical feedback at various stages. I also thank the editors of this special issue, Jacob Lahne and Christy Spackman, and two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading and generative comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Following standard anthropological practice, Amalpur is a pseudonym.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the American Institute of Indian Studies under Grant 20121067; and the Wenner-Gren Foundation under Grant 8593.

Notes on contributors

Hayden S. Kantor

Hayden S. Kantor is a Lecturer in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University. He received his PhD from the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University in 2016. His research concerns food, agriculture, and the ethics of care in Bihar, India.