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.