Culinary Carework Among Transnational Coorg Foodies

This paper explores ‘cultural citizenship’ (Winarnita, 2008) and ‘carework' (Longman et al., 2013) from the site of (cyber-)kitchens. As part of an increasing cohort of transnational skilled migrants and recognizing themselves to be part of a vanishing community (Ponnapa, 2013), the Coorgs of South India confront community pressures to ‘preserve’ Kodavame (i.e. obligations to the homeland of Kodagu and its customary ways). I explore this distinctly maternal, feminized labour of cooking, feeding, and sustaining culinary heritage among an e-diaspora/digital diaspora. Evidence for my arguments are drawn from a netnography of public weblogs, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok posts/videos, online community websites, and accompanying comments. Content analysis of this visual, textual, audio material from transnational Coorg food bloggers and community conversations sparked by these is then conducted. I discuss how culinary carework manifests online by studying how ancestral and family recipes are creatively adapted in modernity, circulated as a form of intergenerational and horizontal care, and in effect become recipes for performing ‘Coorg’ identities under migration. I conclude by offering my findings from food blogs as digital spaces of moral community with variant extensions of care curated online as part of kin-keeping and community-building. I discuss affective implications of this ‘cyber culinary carework’ via the production of community pride, nostalgia, hospitality, and joy. Recipes for being Coorg form part of broader online culturework among transnational Coorg communities which includes work on its endangered language, spiritual practices, music, clothing and identities and so on. This identity performances viz-a-viz other transnational Indians inculcates ‘affiliative emplacement’ (Somaiah, 2022), and enlivens an effervescent ethnoscape (Appadurai, 1996). Moving beyond ‘festival foodwork’ (Somaiah, 2022) in-situ, the paper explores online worlds of sense, taste, and memorable meal-making for transnational and diasporic Coorg families.