An Embodied Discourse

Ritual, identity and nation around the uruguayan asado

Abstract

The asado in Uruguay constitutes a practice that transcends the merely culinary to become a ritual of commensality that stages national identity. Through a methodology grounded in historical and ethnographic research, this article examines the trajectory of the asado, from its first descriptions in the eighteenth century to its persistence in the twenty-first.

Historically, the asado is linked to the figure of the gaucho, whose re-signification in the nineteenth century allowed criollo elites to forge a national narrative based on an idealized rural identity. However, the modern asado is a product of urbanization, and its ultimate meaning—the self-institution of festive time—can only be understood within modern life and the temporal division imposed by the workweek, all experiences foreign to the gaucho’s world.

The asado also functions as a performative act of identity. Its practice articulates gender distinctions, expressing the persistence of symbolic roles associated with the masculine and the festive, as opposed to the feminine and the everyday. On the discursive plane, the asado inverts the nineteenth-century dichotomy of civilization and barbarism, transfiguring the rural as a source of virtue and authenticity.