Kitchen archives and the worlds they nourish: Past and present in England and the Mayab

Abstract

Kitchen archives emerge from practices that make life possible: the household routines of healing, cooking, and relating to the land. They take many forms, recipes, stories, tools, gestures, and even the land itself, all deeply rooted in a territory’s ways of living, being, and knowing. This dissertation explores these archives through the dialogue between the present and the early modern periods in England and the era of Spanish occupation in the Mayab (so-called Yucatán, Mexico). I study how Maya tsikbal (horizontal dialogue) and tsi’ib (writing as continuing patterns) have upheld a world under threat through cyclical renewal, and how English paperwork enacted the values and hierarchies of elite households’ oeconomy. My analysis also extends to scrutinising scholarly interventions, from contemporary efforts to reclaim English recipe books to the early twentieth- century scholars who uprooted manuscripts from the Mayab, interventions that have shaped the legibility of these records. For this, I combine critical archival studies with critical theory from Abya Yala (the so-called American continent) to advance the framework of the “archival pluriverse”, which recognises that many worlds coexist, each with distinct record-keeping traditions, and that archives actively sustain the worlds they both inhabit and constitute. Methodologically, I bridge disciplines, combining traditional archival research and textual analysis with ethnography and participatory action to trace the perspectives of scholars, dealers, archivists, and communities who create, preserve, and use these repositories of everyday knowledge. By travelling through the provenance histories of kitchen archives, I reveal efforts to maintain, understand, and renew their records and the losses and silences along the way. With this, I argue that archives are terrains where worlds are lived, made, and defended, urging that, as historians, we recognise our own role in determining whose worlds get to endure.