Eating Religiously

Food and Faith in the 21st Century

Nir Avieli, Fran Markowitz, Nir Avieli, Fran Markowitz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781032551616
• eBook ISBN: 9781000988154
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Religion
• Index: Social Sciences

This book, the first of its kind, critically analyzes the conjunctions of 21st century food, faith and society. It aims to provide a fresh approach that theorizes the culinary sphere in its association with morality, identity, justice and the sublime.

In a changing climate of food fads, diet plans, gastropolitics and fusion tastes, this edited volume interrogates, analyzes and critiques various situations in which food, the state, civil society, gender, race, and faith intersect and even transmute. Informed by emergent post-secularist views of religion(s) and novel approaches to twenty-first century forms of mobility and fixity, the book's primary aim is to ponder through ethnography the manifold meanings of food, eating and commensality as dynamic social and religious practices. The main goal of Eating Religiously: Food and Faith in the 21st Century is to present cutting-edge anthropological research that examines the causes, effects, meanings and repercussions of theoretical and real-world relationships between culinary practices and religion, identity politics and national pride.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Food, Culture, and Society.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction—Eating religiously: food and faith in the 21st century
• 1 Food as faith: suffering, salvation and the Paleo diet in Australia
• 2 “Here I can like watermelon”: culinary redemption among the African Hebrew Israelites
• 3 This is not a sacrifice: interpretations of the Madagh among Armenians
• 4 Feeding activism in Russia: the transgressive politics of the church potluck
• 5 On not eating onions and grains: conspicuous non-consumption in the new Vietnamese religion of Caodaism
• 6 Fifty shades of kosher: negotiating kashrut in Palestinian food spaces in Israel
• 7 “Food unites us… not anymore!?” Indonesian pilgrims eating kosher and halal in Jerusalem
• 8 Cooking up religion: women, culture and culinary power
• 9 Avoidances and transgressions: agency, religiosity, and moralism in food and politics
• Appendix
• Index