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Paper short abstract

Tracing charcoal from rural earth kilns to urban kitchens in northern Uganda, this presentation explores thermoception across its uneven social and material transformations that sustain livelihoods, expose bodies, and fold into everyday experiences of irregular weather patterns.

Paper long abstract

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in northern Uganda, this paper examines situated thermal transformations in relation to charcoal, the predominant cooking fuel in urban househoulds across Sub-Saharan Africa. The analysis is developed through close sensory and visual attention to combustion across production and use of charcoal.

First, heat is encountered in the conversion of trees into charcoal in agricultural clearings, where young men tend slow-burning fires sealed beneath soil. This heat is later reactivated in domestic spaces, where charcoal is burned to cook food and ensure safe consumption, while also allowing women to attend to children and other household obligations during the thermoceptive process. Across these contexts, heat sticks to the skin and produces sweat that signals effort and endurance. It is a condition for nourishment and care, shaping what can be done, when, and for how long, and becoming emblematic to moral perceptions of what constitutes a good person.

Simultaneously, the heat from charcoal combustion is accompanied by smoke and fine particulate matter that enters the bodies of women and children working in close proximity. These thermoceptive processes are increasingly discussed in relation to changing weather patterns, as interlocutors describe hotter conditions and delayed rains, associating these shifts with the disappearance of trees for charcoal production.

By tracing heat across its material transformations, from tree to fuel, to food, to bodily exposure, and to climatic interpretation, the paper shows how thermoception is embedded in more-than-human assemblages that both sustain and transfigure everyday life in uneven ways.