Enfoques

Cooking Saudade: Embodied Knowledge and Diasporic Portuguese Identity Through Food and Music

Mariana Da Silva Gabriel

University of California, Davis

DOI: 10.58748/MDSGC

Resumen:

The smell of onions and garlic sizzling in olive blending with the murmur of a fado on the radio, and the animated conversation between my parents, this is a ritual I have known since  childhood. This sensory world has shaped my Portuguese family's kitchens from Setúbal to  London to California. In Portuguese diaspora, recipes are more than sustenance; they are  memory, and music is the resonance of saudade. But food and music are not merely parallel  identity markers, they are synesthetically integrated and embodied. This multimedia  autoethnographic project examines how diasporic cultural knowledge is transmitted through  embodied sensory practices. Drawing on David Sutton’s concept of synesthesia, Diana  Taylor's archive/repertoire framework, Tomie Hahn’s embodying culture, and Sarah Pink's  sensory ethnography, this project document how my family passes recipes through oral  instruction, gestural demonstration, and sonic emplacement rather than written texts. Short  films documenting my cooking of family recipes—learned through phone calls with my  parents—paired with curated Portuguese music playlists that reflect the synesthetic memory.  Through reflexive methodology, I challenge both anthropology's "us versus them" paradigm  and Western scholarship's privileging of text over embodiment. By centering multisensory  practices, this work offers a personal perspective for understanding how embodied  knowledge shapes diasporic identity.