Stewart, Paul James;
(2025)
Thinking of Cooking: An Intuitive Restaurant Ethnography.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
Based on nine months of gruelling fieldwork in a London restaurant, first as a kitchen apprentice learning the skills of a chef and then a waiter in a dining room, this thesis argues that professional kitchen ethnography, and restaurants themselves, are overdue increased attention from anthropology. Particularly its provocation that certain restaurants function like conventional art objects, it draws significantly from Alfred Gell's anthropology of art, and does not restrict its theoretical purview to the anthropology of food. Instead, and to mimic the breadth of conceptual opportunities they present to anthropology, the thesis examines restaurants from a number of perspectives to match the complex entities they are. It theorises the cultural meaning of intuition, which covers intuitive cooking and intuitively experiencing the world, through the relation between cooking, thought and world-making. The elements of professional cooking its ethnographic focus, this work does not flinch from depicting the hard realities of the kitchen life, and its drawbacks for chefs and fieldworkers alike. This methodological contribution to an anthropology of restaurants supplements showing how intuitive restaurants, the main project analytic, fundamentally differ from the more substantially theorised modernist canon of restaurants. Chapters take in the body, movement, magic, play, alchemy, making and knowledge, the social contingency of restaurants in an increasingly capitalist world also addressed. Restaurants and the materials they produce enable humans to make and think together, building worlds in ways that range from the autonomy of low-intervention to control of micromanagement. In conclusion, this thesis evaluates what possibilities are offered by the prospect of honest cooking and living.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Thinking of Cooking: An Intuitive Restaurant Ethnography |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2025. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Anthropology |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10204519 |
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