FEMINIST STUDIES AND THE TRADITIONAL WAY OF COOKING TORTILLAS IN GUERRERO

Assuming that “matter matters” in our own research influences the way we approach the field. Like Annemarie Mol says, “the ethnographic study of practices does not search for knowledge in subjects who have it in their minds and may talk about it. Instead, it locates knowledge primarily in activities, events, buildings, instruments, procedures, and so on” (2003, 32). The body, from this perspective, is not just some support or referent where knowledge is instantiated (Barad 2008, 139); instead, it speaks for itself; it is always related to other entities and discursive practices. In my case the body was a key for understanding the knowledge involved in the practices of cooking with firewood. I decided to carry a small GoPro camera that I placed on a chest support to record while I was walking, talking to women, learning to make tortillas. But when I saw the videos, they were useless. My height didn’t allow me to see what the women were doing because they were much shorter than me. Also, they were the ones doing the activity that I wanted to understand, and the camera was not recording that action. Then I asked one them if she wanted to use the camera while she was talking with me and cooking, and she agreed to it. This allowed me not only to record, but also to see things that I had not noticed before, things that women couldn’t express through words, all the small details of how they make tortillas: I saw their hands picking the first tortilla they made and making the sign of the cross with it to bless it, I could also see how they always placed the tortillas “face” upwards, because they believe that if you do not, people are not going to feel full after eating. This is one example of the methodological turns that guided my research, and it illustrates how assuming that the social is a field of embodied and materially interwoven practices where knowledge is built, necessarily affects the ways we decide to approach it.