Traditional Colombian cuisines objects and ritual

Abstract

Traditional Colombian cuisines are intangible heritage of the country, and even when globally they still have a way to go to reach high recognition, they have great potential, and along the last years an important work of rescue and highlight of them has been taking place. They have been also a focus of interest of academic work from different knowledge areas, however designers are barely involved. Many aspects of Colombian culinary dimension need to be analyzed yet, and in that way strength the highlighting work. This paper is an effort to characterize and analyze attributes of preparation and consumption rituals in some Colombian traditional dishes, specifically plates for the region of Valle del Cauca, as a matter of an exploratory work, in order to approach a model based on the ritual analysis that allows to create a dish “taxonomy” for the future work in different fields of knowledge including design, mainly because it is part of a future undergraduate thesis. For the field work ethnographic techniques as participant observation and semi structured interviews were used, the obtained information was organized in consumption ritual categories of an own diagram model created from several authors perspectives, however, to fulfil it in a more complete way, techniques that dig further in the symbolic aspects are necessary.