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This article considers the emerging Bolivian gastronomic discourse as a project fraught with tensions. On the one hand, the discourse surrounding Bolivian cuisine, as presented in urban restaurants, highlights a new kind of nationalism that promotes regional cooking and innovation. This process has elevated indigenous ingredients, such as quinoa, chuño (freeze-dried potatoes), and llama meat, to the status of delicacies. This gastronomic emergence parallels the recent rise of an indigenous middle-class, as well as the shifting political boundaries between indigenous and non-indigenous in the era of President Evo Morales. Nevertheless, elite urban forms of Bolivian cuisine only partially transcend gender, class, and ethnic divides; they sometimes have the (unintended) effect of highlighting and re-inscribing existing social fault-lines. This article considers how indigenous Bolivian women are used to mark Bolivian cuisine, while they are simultaneously marginalized from it. While indigenous women dominate the "culinary field" of quotidian eating in domestic and marketplace arenas, they are far less evident in the "gastronomic fields" of elite restaurants, cookbooks, and written texts. Despite this exclusion, their presence is often invoked through ethnically-marked clothing such as the pollera and their symbolic production of "local" food. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bolivian restaurants in Madrid, like other Spanish restaurants, obscure clients from public view, complicating the idea of restaurants as public space. These are locations of “compartmentalized intimacy” that both blur and maintain divisions between restaurant staff, customers, family members, and friends. The deliberate structuring of space to create the semi-public nature of the restaurant is part of a larger process of “culinary translation” between the multiple audiences that interact in this space. Such translations involve not only the preparation and modification of dishes but also the structure of spaces where this food and drink are consumed. In other words, how space is organized within the restaurant is as much a part of the interactions between staff and customers as the food and drink they serve. All these translations, while always context-specific and incomplete, actively forge “compartmentalized intimacies” between the Bolivian, Spanish, and Chinese clients and the Bolivian owner and staff who eat there. These intimacies are not always proportional to how much money changes hands, even though they are mediated by their commercial nature. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The articles presented in this special issue explore connections between food and meaning at the intersection of public and private spaces. They highlight the myriad ways in which food and eating practices shape indigenous, national, religious, and immigrant identities. They engage global politics, define and contest the boundaries of community, and discuss new spaces of economic exchange and sociality. The contributors engage emerging constructions of “fieldwork,” “the field,” and place. They consider the challenges and rewards of conducting fieldwork in semi-public culinary spaces, often crossing—sometimes transgressively, always meaningfully—boundaries between public and private, national and transnational, local and global. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]