This book provides an interdisciplinary examination of Peruvian cuisine’s shift from a culinary to a political object and the making of Peru as a food nation on the global stage. It focuses on the contexts, processes and protagonists that have endowed the country’s cuisine with new meaning, new coherence and prominence, and with the ability to communicate what was important for Peruvians after decades of political violence and economic decline. This work unfolds central processes of the culinary project ranging from the emergence of gastronomy, to the refiguring of indigenous people as producers, to the use of cultural identity as an authenticating force. From the Plate to Gastro-Politics offers a critical reading of what has been called a “gastronomic revolution”, highlighting the ways in which claims to national unity and social reconciliation smooth over ongoing inequalities. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of food studies, cultural anthropology, heritage studies and Latin American studies.

Investigating local Indigenous processes of creation and creativity, this book uses ethnographic and comparative anthropological perspectives to enquire about creative transformative practices in lowland South America. The volume shows how people create and reinforce their conditions of being by employing different genres of transgression and by creatively shifting contexts of significance. Local socio-cosmic orders, the interrelation of creative genres (myth, verbal art, song, ritual, and handicrafts), and their changing frames of reference (from communal celebrations to wider political and commercial realms) demonstrate the relational, generative, and processual quality of Amerindian creativity.