Words: Sara Bardhan
Images: Sara Bardhan

Image caption: Dosa and fried fish from a roadside stall

4 June 2026

“Through eating, the ethnographer encounters culture, not as an abstract system of symbols, but as something lived through the body. Food reveals how knowledge is cultivated through practice, how taste emerges through touch as much as through flavour, and how social worlds are negotiated through acts of sharing.”


Sara Bardhan

After a long day of fieldwork in Pondicherry, my friends and I stopped by a small kitchen near the beach for dinner. A single yellow bulb swung overhead, throwing long shadows across the tiny kitchen. Upon seeing us, Shanti Aunty threw her long shocks of curly black hair into a bun and placed a flat iron pan over the flame. The dosa batter, a pale mixture of split black gram, rice flour, and water, slid from her ladle onto the hot surface. With a surgeon’s precision, she spread it in widening circles. The batter hissed softly, edges lifting and crisping in the heat. Beside her, another burner crackled to life. Marinated fish hit the oil with a playful splutter, sending up bursts of turmeric, chili, and sea salt into the humid night air. When the dosa turned golden and brittle at the edges, Aunty lifted it delicately from the pan and folded it in half, steam escaping like a sigh. After wiping her sweat with a kitchen towel, she reached for a pile of onions. Her knife struck the cutting board in quick, practiced bursts.

Within seconds, a sharp sting filled the air. After a dozen quick, sharp, rhythmic cuts, our dinner was on our laps: crispy dosa folded neatly beside glistening fried fish. My friend, who had never had fish with the bone in before, peeled away a corner of the crisp skin first, revealing soft white flesh underneath. Using her fingers, she gently separated the meat along the spine, feeling carefully for thin needle-like bones hidden inside. Between bites, she rubbed onion slices through the leftover masala on the plate and squeezed lemon over the fish, the citrus cutting through the richness and releasing another burst of aroma into the night. Around us, scooters buzzed past, waves collapsed against the shore, and the shack’s yellow light flickered in the warm coastal wind.

02.

Chicken biriyani with a side of eggplant salan (gravy) and onions

For an ethnographer, eating on the field is an exercise in reflection. With each pull, knead, tear, cut, bite, thrust, slice, an anthropologist is confronted with body-techniques involved in cooking and eating. By eating in the field and experimenting with one’s own eating, an anthropologist also discovers the continuum of technologies, techniques, flavours and foods that are embedded in the cultural geography they are working in. In Pondicherry, I wondered how women, like Shanti Aunty and my mother back home, learn the precise geometry of cooking a perfectly round dosa. How do they know exactly how much force to channel through the hips while kneading dough? When porridge is over stirred? Anthropologist Marcel Mauss (1973) articulated these techniques (with an emphasis on their plurality) as design accomplishments. Instead of taking how we move, eat, cook, and drink for granted, he denaturalised them as learnt behaviours transmitted through tradition. Bourdieu (1984) echoes this and further suggests that one’s habitus is acted out physically through “bodily hexis.” This bodily hexis or bodily knowledge (Heldke, 1992), is then embedded in one’s physicality and embodied through repetition.

South Asian cultures are typically somatic culinary cultures. Apart from body-techniques that prepare one to one learn to crush potatoes into rice and lentils with precisely the right pressure and proportion using only their fingers, the ‘composite viscosity’ of eating with fingers (Mann et al., 2011) forces the anthropologist to rethink dichotomies of civilisation/exoticness. Moreover, it also then helps one think through the possibilities of how taste is constructed and experienced through sensorial modalities like touch. For instance, eating biryani by hand involves a finely coordinated choreography of fingers, one’s palm, and wrist. The fingertips first gather a small mound of rice, drawing together grains from different parts of the plate. A piece of meat is separated from the bone with the thumb and forefinger, while a sliver of onion is folded into the mixture. The rice is loose and grainy, the onion crisp, the salan slick against skin. Salan is then incorporated in measured quantities, not enough to make the rice runny, but sufficient to coat the grains with its tangy richness. The fingers knead these elements together lightly. Once assembled, the thumb acts as a lever, pushing the morsel balanced on the first three fingers into the mouth. Then the cycle begins again. Rice. Meat. Onion. Gravy. Mix. Lift. Eat.

When I ate chicken biriyani (image 2) with my peers in the field, like Mann et al. (2011), I realised that tasting does not start once the sensorial data has reached the nostrils and tongue. Instead, ‘there is already “tasting” going on while my food is still on my plate’ (ibid). Invoking Sarah Pink (2009) in this context highlights how multisensory practices such as eating and cooking are not merely objects of ethnographic inquiry but also ways of organising, interpreting, and making meaning. Through these embodied engagements, sensory experience becomes a mode of analysis, revealing how meaning is generated through the intertwining of perception, movement, and practice.

05. 

Ragi Koozh - a refreshing summer beverage with finger millet and yogurt served with pickle and onions

Pink’s (2009) discussion of sensory ethnography, alongside broader conversations about embodiment, problematises eating, and particularly eating together, as practices that are more than merely everyday acts. As Marovelli (2018) notes, such practices are not necessarily convivial or collaborative, but can also be shaped by tension, exclusion, and unequal social relations. Anthropologists have long understood commensality as interactional, symbolic, and discursive (Douglas 1975; Fischler 2011; Vanderslice 2020), but in the field, shared meals often do more than generate sociality, in the Simmelian sense like Symons (1994) writes. They transform relationships, repositioning the ethnographer from observer to participant and, at times, into an informant whose body becomes implicated in the social worlds being studied. Eating-together, especially, outside of “commensal units” (Bloch 1999), like family, are usually acts of “exceptional commensality” (Giacoman 2016) in the field and they deserve critical attention in anthropological literature surrounding method(ology). Sharing food, therefore, presents both as the mode of analysis as well as the object of analysis.

This is particularly relevant in the Indian context where food is a casteised object. Scholars like Louis Dumont (1970) have written in exceptional detail about the rules of purity and pollution that govern Hindu food exchange. During fieldwork, an invitation to share a meal can carry the weight of caste, kinship, and morality. As Mary Douglas (1966) argues, ideas of purity and pollution are not merely concerns about hygiene but systems for organising social boundaries and maintaining moral order. As an upper-caste ethnographer, the act of accepting a cup of tea, eating from a common plate, or sitting alongside others during a meal is entangled with long-standing ideas of purity and pollution and is subject to intense moral, social, and cultural scrutiny.

Yet these moments are rarely straightforward. When people eat together across social boundaries, hierarchy does not necessarily disappear. Rather, it may be suspended, negotiated, or rendered temporarily ambiguous. A shared meal can create a fleeting sense of intimacy and equality while leaving the broader structures that organise social difference intact. It is precisely this tension that makes commensality analytically productive. Whether it is on the field or after a long day, sharing food with peers, colleagues, and interlocutors produces a range of new ethnographic meanings that are affective and embodied.

07. 

Meen Kuzhambu - a spicy, saucy, tangy fish curry with roti (flatbread)

Returning to Shanti Aunty’s beachside kitchen, what remains striking is not simply the food itself but the dense web of relations, techniques, sensations, and meanings that gathered around it. The circular motion of the dosa batter on the pan, the careful removal of fish bones, the tactile mixing of biryani and salan, and the shared meal among friends and interlocutors were not incidental details of fieldwork. This was fieldwork. Through eating, the ethnographer encounters culture, not as an abstract system of symbols, but as something lived through the body.  Food reveals how knowledge is cultivated through practice, how taste emerges through touch as much as through flavour, and how social worlds are negotiated through acts of sharing.

At the same time, meals expose the tensions embedded within everyday life: between intimacy and hierarchy, inclusion and exclusion, equality and distinction. To eat in the field is therefore to participate in these negotiations, becoming implicated in the very social realities one seeks to understand. Sensory ethnography reminds us that knowledge is not produced solely through observation or interpretation but also through the embodied acts of tasting, touching, cooking, and eating together. In this sense, the meal is never merely a meal; it is both a method of inquiry and a site where ethnographic knowledge is made.

References

Bloch, M. (1999). Commensality and Poisoning. Social Research, 66(1), 133–149.

Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste (R. Nice, Trans.). Harvard University Press.

Douglas, M. (1966). Purity and danger: An analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo. Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Douglas, M. (1975). Deciphering a meal. In Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology (pp. 249–275). Routledge.

Dumont, L. (1970). Homo hierarchicus: The caste system and its implications (M. Sainsbury, Trans.). Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

Fischler, C. (2011). Commensality, society and culture. Social Science Information, 50(3–4), 528–548.

Giacoman, C. (2016). The dimensions and role of commensality: A theoretical model drawn from the significance of communal eating among adults in Santiago, Chile. Appetite, 107, 460–470.

Heldke, L. (1992). Foodmaking as a thoughtful practice. In D. W. Curtin & L. Heldke (Eds.), Cooking, eating, thinking: Transformative philosophies of food (pp. 203–229). Indiana University Press.

Mann, A., Mol, A., Satalkar, P., Savirani, A., Selim, N., Sur, M., & Yates-Duerr, E. (2011). Mixing methods, tasting fingers. HAU Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 1(1), 221–243.

Marovelli, B. (2018). Cooking and eating together in London: Food sharing initiatives as collective spaces of encounter. Geoforum, 99, 190–201.

Mauss, M. (1973). Techniques of the body. Economy and Society, 2(1), 70–88.

Pink, S. (2009). Doing sensory ethnography. Sage.

Symons, M. (1994). Simmel’s gastronomic sociology: An overlooked essay. Food and Foodways, 5(4), 333–351.

Vanderslice, K. (2020). Making and Breaking: an embodied ethnography of eating. Graduate Journal of Food Studies, 04(01).

Writer Bio

Sara is an applied social scientist and qualitative researcher. Their research, situated at the intersection of urban studies and critical theory, revolves around cities, spatial justice, embodiment, social reproduction, and world building. They are currently an Assistant Professor in Sociology at Somaiya Vidyavihar, Mumbai.

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