Touching food: On finding the tech-tile†

Abstract

This article wrestles with the question of the relationship between the digits of our hands and the digital in a dispersed but connected world. What can be held and what fails our grasp in such a universe? How the everyday and habitual skills of cooking and cleaning come into consciousness or vanish into habit, in a constant choreography of remembering and forgetting, with the digital as aid or hindrance. In the process of thinking through posture, gesture, and infrastructure, it reflects on the enduring contemporary challenge of doing ethnographic work at multiple transnational locations, by an ethnographer with a passport that does not travel well, made worse by the restrictions of a pandemic. In the process, it shows how the same hands that can heal, can also hurt.