"Other-Maizes": Paths and Culinary Transformation of Maize in Ambato (Catamarca, Northwestern Argentina)

Abstract

This paper describes and analyzes the paths and culinary transformations of maize in domestic contexts at Ambato (Catamarca, northwest Argentina), during 6th-11th centuries, from the study of different types of archaeological remains. The ways in which the trajectories and transformations involved in daily dynamics allow us to suggest, in line with another works for the Andean region, that the linking of this resource to different dimensions of social life was, at least in part, because of its involvement in a variety of culinary manipulations. These manipulations, far from operating as mediations between a «natural» state of the resource and its intake, has to be seen as irreplaceable instances of socialization of it, in order to produce it as an other-maize that could then articulate different relations of commensality; the implementation of techniques in the kitchen, then, involved a process of «culinary specification».