The University of Arizona Press
Date: Tuesday, February 25, 2025
Time: 7 p.m. – 8:30 p.m., CST
Where: Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City
Meena Khandelwal will talk about her new book, Cookstove Chronicles : Social Life of a Women’s Technology in India, at the Book Matters event at Prairie Lights Books. Elana Buch, associate professor of anthropology, will join anthropologists Brady G’sell and Khandelwal for a conversation and Q&A with the audience. Light refreshments will follow. This event is free and open to the public. RSVP here.
About the book:
Stove improvers have been designing and promoting “clean” or “efficient” biomass cookstoves in India since the 1940s and have been frustrated to find their carefully engineered stoves abandoned in trash heaps or repurposed as storage bins, while the traditional mud chulha retains a central place in the kitchen. Why do so many Indian women continue to use wood-burning, smoke-spewing stoves when they have other options?
Based on anthropological research in Rajasthan, Cookstove Chronicles argues that the supposedly obsolete chulha persists because it offers women control over the tools needed to feed their families. Their continued use of old stoves alongside the new is not a failure to embrace new technologies but instead a strategy to maximize flexibility and autonomy. The chulha is neither the villain nor hero of this story. It produces particulate matter that harms people’s bodies, leaves soot on utensils and walls, and accelerates glacial melting and atmospheric warming. Yet it also depends on renewable biomass fuel and supports women’s autonomy as a local, do-it-yourself technology.
