Paper short abstract:

Arriving in Mombasa, Kenya with the intention of researching food and exclusion amongst Muslim communities of Gujarati origin, it soon became apparent that food was, in many ways, off-limits to me: here I consider the possibilities created by that predicament.

Paper long abstract:

Much of my initial research proposal was shaped by a long-standing interest in food and exclusion. Somewhat jaded with the emphasis on food as a positive factor in the lives of dispersed populations - prevalent in much of the food and diaspora literature - I arrived in Mombasa, Kenya with a plan to focus on the way various Muslim communities of Gujarati origin use food as a means to critique, castigate and keep out others. I had not expected those others to include myself.

This paper looks at the process through which I came to learn that I would not be allowed to touch the food of most of the people I had imagined cooking with, and the consequences of being frequently precluded from domestic cooking spaces. Grappling with an untouchable ethnographic subject forced a reappraisal of my own culturally-specific notions of sociability, permeability and the limits of bodies. It also pushed my research into new spaces and directions - sometimes relating to food, but much of it not. Here, I contemplate the dynamic process between exclusion and inclusion that characterised much of my fieldwork experience, whereby obstacles in one area served to open up others. I conclude by considering some of the challenges posed by the forms of exclusion I experienced on the process of writing-up.