Cooking Culture: Women’s Culinary Agency and Everyday Creativity in Rural Mali

Winner of a Gourmand Food Culture Book Award 2025 - 1st place in Africa categoryIn this open access book, Stephen Wooten offers a holistic historical ethnography of cooking and female agency in West Africa, and of the broader cultural and historical significance of women’s culinary agency. Drawing on archaeological evidence, historical accounts, and extensive ethnographic research, Stephen Wooten documents and theorizes Malian women’s culinary agency.He finds that their cooking not only transforms raw ingredients into cooked fare, providing essential physical nourishment, but also helps foster fundamental values, facilitate elemental family and community dynamics, and reproduce gender identities and relations.These findings shed light on the cultural productivity of cooking within a specific African context and foster a deeper appreciation for the significance of culinary dynamics more broadly.The study makes important contributions to the fields of African studies, anthropology, and “