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Technological Change and Contemporary Transformations in Yucatecan Cooking

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Globalized Eating Cultures

Abstract

This chapter explores the part played by different technologies, including social media, in contemporary cooking practices among Yucatecans in Mérida, Yucatán. It demonstrates how the proliferation of different media provides Yucatecans with several alternative and complementary platforms from which they can demonstrate their affect for the food, their place of origin (Yucatán), and the local practices of commensality and hospitality—that is, they are turned into sites from where to express regionalist feelings and identity. It argues that new information technologies and social media play an important part in contemporary constructions of senses of community and, at the same time, are turned into important and constitutive parts of culinary and gastronomic formations.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I find that although the work by Melucci (1996a; See also 1991 and 1996b) and Castells (1997) have been important in opening new venues for the analysis of social movements in an era of global mediated and mediatized communication, they share a more systemic/functionalist approach that, despite their caveats, assumes a certain stability and sense of unity to collective movements that do not describe the processes I am discussing here. In contrast, I find that de Landa’s Deleuzian theory of the assemblage better captures the fragmented, unstable, fluid socio-cultural mobilization of affects I describe and analyze in this chapter. As de Landa argues (2006, 9), it is the relations of interiority that characterize preceding understandings of collective associations; that is, “the component parts are constituted by the very relations they have to other parts in the whole.” Assemblages, on the other hand, are constituted by their relations of exteriority: “A whole in which the component parts are self-subsistent and their relations are external to each other does not possess an organic unity.” In addition, among other defining traits (pp. 10–16), assemblages can include from the very material to expressive roles (p. 12).

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Acknowledgments

This chapter is based on research supported by the Mexican Council of Science and Technology (CONACyT CB-156796) on new technology and cultural change in contemporary Yucatán. I thank Dr Gabriela Vargas-Cetina for reading and commenting my text. Finally, this chapter has been written thanks to time afforded by sabbatical leave from the Autonomous University of Yucatán (UADY) and during my affiliation with the Institute of Anthropological Research at the Mexican Autonomous National University (IIA-UNAM). I wish to express my sincere thanks to Dr Celia Rosado Avilés and Dr Cristina Oehmichen Bazán for their institutional support.

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  1. Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, Mérida, Mexico

    Steffan Igor Ayora-Diaz

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  1. Steffan Igor Ayora-Diaz
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  1. Public Administration and Finance, Ludwigsburg University of Applied Sciences, Ludwigsburg, Germany

    Jörg Dürrschmidt

  2. Institute for Sociology, Justus-Liebig University Giessen, Giessen, Germany

    York Kautt

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Ayora-Diaz, S.I. (2019). Technological Change and Contemporary Transformations in Yucatecan Cooking. In: Dürrschmidt, J., Kautt, Y. (eds) Globalized Eating Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93656-7_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93656-7_6

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