The Fast and the Fusion: Class, Colonialism and the Remaking of Comida Típica in Highland Ecuador

Abstract

In this chapter, I examine the way in which comida típica (defined as typical, local food) is being reconfigured and reproduced and interplays with class subjectivities, in the greater Cuenca region of the Ecuadorian Andes. Goody famously argued that ‘culinary differentiation … is linked to a particular kind of hierarchy, with distinct styles of life’ (1982: 105) and demonstrated not only that food is a marker of social differentiation but also that the relational valuation of foods and food sites is structurally informed by class position and social hierarchies.¹ Expanding on this thesis, I look to identify the orientations — in time and space — that underpin class-based eating practices. These orientations — whether directed towards the pre-colonial past, Spain and the colonial encounter, North American modernity or global cosmopolitanism — are one of the scaffolds on which class distinctions are built and performed. Furthermore, they are woven into the very fabric of regional belonging and provide social actors with the means through which to create differing class-based regional subjectivities. I argue that being Cuencano — and eating Cuencano — is a very different experience from the subject position of, to draw on the ethnographic examples discussed below, those living within migrant-peasant households, a member of the lower urban classes, a North American retired expatriate aspiring to an alternative lifestyle or a middle-class professional concerned with the erosion of cultural heritage.