Location: Meertens Institute, Oudezijds Achterburgwal 185, Amsterdam
Dates: 13-14-15 November, 2019
Please register by e-mailing Pieter van der Woude (p.p.m.vanderwoude@students.uu.nl)
-> there has been a last-minute change in the program (12-11-2019) that affects the sessions on Thursday afternoon and Friday morning. See the program below for the accurate line-up of the conference.
Full program
November 13
14.30
Welcome & Introduction
Birgit Meyer, Utrecht University
15.00-15:45
Annalisa Butticci, MPI
Starving the Spirits. Religious Gastro-Politics in Post-Colonial Ghana
Drawing from extensive ethnographic research in Elmina, this paper focuses on the entangled relationship between ritual food, religion and politics in post-colonial Ghana. Elmina is the town of the first European colonial settlements and slave-trading posts. It is also the town of the first Christian missions and of seventy-seven gods and one Saint, called Nana Ntona, the local name of the Catholic Saint Anthony. For centuries, various festivals and offerings of ritual food and sacrifices honored and pacified these gods who, in return, granted to the Elminians abundant fishing and harvest, as well as social and spiritual power, peace and stability. But in recent years, something dramatically changed. Political authorities are refusing to provide to the Okompfos, the traditional priests taking care of the gods, the animals, fruits and alcohol for the rituals. As a result, the gods are starving and the Okompfos are not performing some important rituals anymore. By historically and anthropologically examining the spiritual gastro-politics of the sacred in Elmina, such as the relations of powers that determine the feeding or starving of the gods, the paper highlights the social tensions and critical socio-economic transformations that are challenging the role and power of traditional gods in contemporary Ghana.
15.45-16.30
Gertrud Hüwelmeier, Humboldt University
Feeding the Spirits – Cooking, Offering and Reclaiming Lộcin Late Socialist Vietnam
Drawing on a material approach to religion, this paper explores food rituals and worshippers’ relationships to intangible realms in late Socialist Vietnam. Since the onset of economic renewal in the late 1980s, altar and shrine offerings have increasingly become a crucial part in people’s everyday lives in Vietnam. These practices involve cooking for ancestors and presenting delicious offerings to gods, deities, and spirits at various localities and in multiple contexts on occasions based on the lunar calendar or to mark significant events. Religious practitioners burn incense and transmit prayers at altars and shrines, and in a response, spirits bestow lộc, blessed food, which is then distributed and consumed by the participants.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Vietnam, this paper argues that the otherworld is accessed and experienced as real through practices of cooking for the spirits and of presenting devotional food offerings and other material objects. By exploring the sites of food offerings as well as the types of food and the variations in presentation styles used at temples and pagodas, funerals and cremations, and at shrines of spirit mediums, this paper will shed light on differences in people’s perceptions about social distance to ancestors, deities, gods, and other spiritual beings.
16.30-16.45 coffee/tea
16.45-17.30
Elizabeth Perez, University of Santa Barbara, via skype
Strong Stomachs: Materialities & Discourses of the Gut in Black Atlantic Religions
This paper examines the materialization of the gut and “gut feelings” in Black Atlantic religions. Drawing heavily from ethnographic research in the transnational West-African-inspired religion of Lucumí or regla ocha (popularly called Santería), I contend that practitioners fashion viscerally felt familial bonds through embodied performances of commensality and the execution of sacrificial cuisine. I argue that practitioners’ discursive thematization of “strong stomachs” and moral-ethical assessments of ritual violence are constitutive of a political-cum-libidinal economy that has yet to be articulated as integral to Afro-Diasporic traditions.
17.30 Discussion, kick off by Birgit Meyer and Angelantonio Grossi
18.15 Drinks, 19.30 Dinner (upon invitation)
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November 14
10.00-10.45
Febe Armanios, Middlebury College
Alcohol in Islamic Perspectives: Past and Present Reflections I
This two-part paper will consider jurisprudential debates surrounding alcohol consumption since early Islamic times and will survey how various Muslim communities have historically oscillated between leniency and stringency in enforcing established rules. The discussion will also reflect on modern attitudes towards alcohol consumption, intoxication, and other related topics. Modern scientific tools, including those enabling the measurement of alcohol by volume (ABV) content, have been increasingly utilized to determine, with more precision, whether varied beverages comply with ancient rules and traditions. The implications of such developments are vast since everything from kombucha and kefir to fruit juices and soda can contain traces of alcohol. Also, in many Muslim countries, the growing popularity of faux libations, such as non-alcoholic beer and non-alcoholic wine, has generated concerns among some religious authorities regarding their propriety and place within an Islamic ethical framework. By exploring these issues, this paper will assess how context-dependent religio-legal sensitivities have shaped the consumption of different beverages and brews, in the past and present.
10.45-11.30
Boğaç Ergene, University of Vermont
Alcohol in Islamic Perspectives: Past and Present Reflections II
11.30-11.45: coffee/tea
11.45-12.30
Rashida Adum-Atta, Utrecht University
Negotiating Pig Feet (Trotter) in Madina Market
Food matters are entangled globally, and the pig feet (trotter) is an interesting entry point in Madina market, Accra, which is religiously and ethnically plural. At this market, there are various food stuffs. However, my focus is on meat, and especially meat that is considered impure by many people. I will situate pig feet (trotter) in a broader context of “other meats”, such as halal meat from the (Muslim) butcher shop and frozen meat (a great deal of which is certified as halal) in the cold stores. Pig feet (trotter) has been around for a long time, but in recent times the consumption of pork has increased due to the publicity it gained through advertisement. This increase may be as a result of people’s taste for meat and its consumption as a symbol of class and wealth, and on another hand, concomitant dumping by European countries where less trotter is consumed. The paper will highlight the history of and increase in importation of trotters from European countries, while paying attention to how trotter is considered as a matter out of place by many Muslim customers and traders; as it evokes disgust, disturbs, and is perceived to violate a religious taboo. I explore pork as a contested religious matters in an entangled world that involves Europe and Ghana, traders and consumers, Muslims and Christians.
12.30
Discussion, kick off by Peter van der Veer and Pooyan Tamimi Arab
13.15-14.15 Lunch
14.15-15.00
Shaheed Tayob, Stellenbosch University
Urban Restaurants as Ethical-Entrepreneurship: Reputation, Taste and Trust in Mumbai
In India, Muslims are represented in the Hindu-Nationalist imaginary as beef eaters and butchers, targets of violence as well as civic and infrastructural neglect. In Mumbai, the old Muslim-majority neighborhoods toward the south of the city are an important hub of trade and economic activity, while at the same time marked as chaotic and imagined as ‘little Pakistan.’ However, like Old Dehli, the area is also exoticized for its colorful markets and Mughlai food. Importantly the process of political marginalization and exclusion as mediated through dietary practice, means that the food industry is also an important location for Muslim employment and entrepreneurship and central to the making of urban space in Mumbai. This paper shifts from questions of marginalization and commodification, towards a consideration of an old Sufi-owned restaurant in the vicinity of Behndi Bazaar. Jehangir Hotel, services a predominantly working-class clientele in a consciously simple setting, with a reputation for high-quality, tasty food. Focusing on the discursive and material articulations of the owner, the restaurant and the food offers an important insight into how a for-profit enterprise embodies an ethics of responsibility and care in contemporary Mumbai. Weaving the labor and political context of the city, with narratives of the restaurants founder, religion, and materiality, offers a lens through which to appreciate restaurants as important site for articulations of ethical practice and religion in contemporary urban space.
15.00-15.45
Margreet van Es – Utrecht University
Halal dining in Rotterdam
This paper focuses on a number of new and fashionable halal restaurants located along the West-Kruiskade in Rotterdam. Although these Muslim-owned restaurants differ in terms of cuisine and interior decorations, they have in common that they only serve halal meat and that they do not serve alcohol. The customers are highly diverse in terms of ethnicity and religious affiliation, but this new form of ‘hip halal dining’ is especially popular among young Muslims who have experienced strong upward social mobility. However, these restaurants have also become a subject of political contestation, with the local authorities and the housing corporation arguing that the growing number of alcohol-free halal restaurants ‘negatively affects the diversity in the neighbourhood’. In analyzing these restaurants as ‘aesthetic formations’, this paper raises questions about how diversity is conceptualized by different social actors, what it means to be inclusive, and on whose terms and conditions religious plurality is being facilitated in particular settings.
15.45-16.00: coffee/tea
16.00-16.45
Manpreet Janeja, Utrecht University
Food, Feeding, and Eating in Plural School Environments: Conundrums, Contestations, Negotiations
School food, feeding and eating are embedded in trenchant national and transnational debates on issues of rising obesity, food (in)security, migration, and ‘integration’ in England and other parts of the UK, as also more widely in Europe and beyond. State interventions and initiatives in the UK such as the National Healthy Schools Programme are amongst various attempts to address this. Successive governments have sought to evoke changes in food preparation and consumption patterns calibrated by varying forms of social inequality, religious and cultural diversity. Through ethnographic vignettes drawing on fieldwork on food, feeding and eating in schools in London, this paper reveals the conundrums, contestations, and negotiations between “unwanted economic difference”, “respect for religious or cultural difference”, and the “need for integration” in fraught plural environments. In so doing, it highlights the role that food, as embedded in the dynamics of trusting/not-trusting, plays in such tensions and conflicts.
16.45-17.45 Discussion, kick off by Ayaj Ghandi and Eric Meinema
18.00 (drinks) 19.00 Dinner (upon invitation)
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November 15
10.00-12.30
Meeting with the speakers only
12.45 Lunch
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The conference is organized by:
-> The Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity (MPI)(hwebsite).The Institute, directed by Peter van der Veer, is one of the foremost centers for the multi-disciplinary study of diversity, in its multiple forms, in today’s globalizing world.
-> The research programme Religious Matters in an Entangled World (www.religiousmatters.nl) directed by Birgit Meyer at Utrecht University. Taking a material and corporeal approach to religion, this programme conceptualizes and studies religion as a tangible and palpable phenomenon that is present in the world through bodily practices and specific material cultures. While the first phase of the programme (2016-2018) concentrates on matters arising around religious buildings, images and objects, the second phase (2019-2020) shifts attention to the nexus of religion and food.
-> The Meertens Institute (MI) in Amsterdam (website). The Meertens Institute, established in 1926, has been a research institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) since 1952. They have a long tradition in the documentation and research of historic and contemporary Dutch language and rituals.
For more information, please contact Annalisa Butticci, butticci@mmg.mpg.de