Date of Award
Spring 2026
Document Type
Open Access Dissertation
Department
History
First Advisor
Matt D. Childs
Abstract
This dissertation examines the construction of Brazilian cuisine from the nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, approaching national cuisine as a contested historical project shaped by power and embodied experience. Drawing on a corpus of more than fifty cookbooks published between 1840 and approximately 1945, and combining digital text analysis with close reading and insights from neuroscience and affect theory, this study argues that the incorporation of Afro-Indigenous foodways into print functioned as a provisional extension of personhood, signaling partial recognition of cultural agency even as legal and civic inclusion remained foreclosed. Although domestic labor, coercion, and market exchange brought Afro-Indigenous foodways into elite culture, structural forces alone cannot explain why these foods endured or came to be celebrated as national. Their persistence depended on sensory attachment: repeated exposure, embodied pleasure, and emotional association accumulated over time, quietly unsettling prejudice and ideological resistance from within. The Brazilian case illuminates a broader Latin American pattern in which nationalist elites elevated marginalized populations as cultural patrimony while sustaining their exclusion, a dynamic enabled by embodied sensory formations that preceded and exceeded its ideological articulation. Flavor, the multisensory integration of taste, smell, affect, and cognition, was the missing mechanism that transformed structural proximity into attachment, and exposure into belonging.
Rights
© 2026, Helen Bertoletti Kampmann Marodin
Recommended Citation
Bertoletti Kampmann Marodin, H.(2026). Experiencing Flavor in the Cauldron of the Three Races: A Biocultural Approach to Brazilian Cuisine. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/8961