Race, Place and Taste: Making Identities Through Sensory Experience in Ecuador

Resumen

Sensory experience is cultural, social and material and it therefore acts as a powerful means of binding people together, or of highlighting their differences. Taste, in particular, is an emotionally charged marker of either familiarity and belonging, or strangeness and alienation. This article uses taste and its interrelated senses as a focus for exploring the construction of subjectivities in a context where racial differences are reproduced through everyday cultural practices such as cooking and eating. In Ecuador, where this ethnography is located, race is understood in terms of place and thus regional cuisines and their associated tastes and smells often become representative of a localised black, indigenous or mestizo culture. Drawing on Howes’ (2005) idea of ‘emplacement,’ this study uses sensory experience to highlight the way in which identities are both discursively and materially constructed, and become embodied without becoming fixed.