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- Convenors:
-
Erica Baffelli
(University of Manchester)
Paulina Kolata (University of Copenhagen)
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- Chair:
-
Erica Baffelli
(University of Manchester)
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Omikron room
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 6 September, -
Time zone: Europe/Vilnius
Short Abstract:
This cross-regional panel will apply an ethnographic approach to discuss food and religion in relation to contemporary Buddhist practices and discourses, including social and environmental crisis.
Long Abstract:
Food has long been recognized as an important signifier of religious identities (e.g. Perez 2016, Gross 2019), including rich scholarship on food restriction (e.g. Stewart 2015, Barstow 2017) and textual studies on prescriptive interpretations of food practices (e.g. Kong 2016). This cross-regional panel will apply an ethnographic approach to discuss food and religion in relation to contemporary Buddhist practices and discourses, including social and environmental crisis. Papers will ask what happens when food is produced, circulated, consumed and disposed of across religious networks and how food enters and enable these networks. The papers in the panel approach food as relational, a technology that makes, disrupts, and unmakes human and non-human relations across and within religious communities. Langer’s paper focuses on food offerings and explores how communities create meaning and interpretation through food in Sri Lanka; Baffelli’s paper focuses on the preparation and distribution of food and the creation of networks and belonging in Buddhist organizations involved in social welfare activities in Japan; Kolata’s paper focuses on food donations in Buddhist temples in rural Japan to explore how they enable and disrupt Buddhist economies and production of waste; finally, Tarocco’s paper focuses on vegetarian practices in Buddhism in China and their meanings in order to discuss the creation of a Buddhist-inspired inclusive ecological view that goes beyond anthropocentric frameworks. These stories of food technologies and their trajectories help us understand not only how food can work to create spaces for articulation and understanding of religious values, but also how food can make religion happen, and how it stimulates and challenges religious networks and practices across contemporary Buddhist contexts in Asia.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 6 September, 2023, -Paper short abstract:
The paper focuses on food offerings and explores how communities create meaning and interpretation through food in Sri Lanka.
Paper long abstract:
Food offerings in Sri Lanka range from scraps of food for the invisible beings collected from the monks to rice and curry for 3,000 people handed out at a generosity stall. The motivations for food offerings are equally varied but nearly always include merit. Large events which require more disposable income and labour are occasions to form merit communities (van Esterick 1985) consisting of sponsors and food makers (often but not exclusively female). These communities not only work together but they can also shape interpretations and create meanings. For example, lay donors increasingly opt to prepare vegetarian food when catering for monastics thereby transforming the consumers into a more virtuous group for the duration of the meal. Equally, many ritual specialists now offer their clients vegetarian options for pujas to demons who traditionally received meat, eggs and blood. Just as the providers, the consumers, too, form communities. These commensal communities can be temporary and for the occasion of a specific offering. For example, at a shrine for deities (devale), the priest accepts the offering and after the deity has enjoyed and transformed it into blessed food (prasād) the priest hands it back to the donor to share with others at the shrine. Others are more permanent, including the commensal community which has the Buddhist temple at its center (Strong 1992) which is hierarchical, with the Buddha at the top and stray and wild animals at the bottom. And just as the providers, the consumers also have power as they can refuse to accept certain foods or reject certain donors. This paper explores the ways these communities create meaning and interpretation through food.
Paper short abstract:
This paper draws on ethnographic research with Buddhist temples in rural Japan to tell stories of food donations as they travel through the Buddhist networked economies. It focuses on how food mobilises and disrupts religious practice by generating waste and how temples handle such edible donations.
Paper long abstract:
This paper draws on ethnographic research with Buddhist temples in rural Japan to tell stories of food donations as they travel through the Buddhist networked economies. It focuses on how food donations mobilise and disrupt religious practice by generating waste and how Buddhist temples deal with this excess of edible gifts. Food is one of the most common donations in Buddhism and it is meant to be consumed by temple priests and their families on behalf of the buddhas. Such food offerings “nourish the buddhas” and embody vital technologies through which people articulate their Buddhist belonging and practice. In rural Japan, food donations are aligned with seasonal production of food, resulting in large quantities of the same produce being donated at a given time. In the depopulating rural communities struggling with the overproduction of food, it becomes particularly troublesome. As offerings, food becomes incorporated into the Buddhist value economies of meritorious giving, and becomes charged with spiritual value. In accumulation, it is both a marker of spiritual potency and material excess. By following what happens to food offerings and how people thereby build connections practically and emotionally, the paper explores how food excess is handled in Buddhist temples caught up in discard and reuse cycles of Buddhist practice. It considers the importance of Buddhist edible gifts for the wider issues of consumption, recycling, and aspirational non-waste economies in contemporary Japan.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how food preparation, donation and redistribution facilitate the creation of support networks between religious communities and marginalised and precarious individuals.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores how food preparation, donation and redistribution facilitate the creation of support networks between religious communities and marginalised and precarious individuals. It will focus on a Buddhist organization established in 2009 and its social welfare activities focused on food preparation and distribution in Tokyo. These activities also facilitate connections between volunteers, who gather together to prepare the food to be distributed. Furthermore, the donation of food to the organization highlights the networks of connections with temple parishioners through food donated to the temple to be redistributed, other religious organizations, and individuals the organization had previously supported. This includes donations of rice sent from the Tohoku region, where the volunteers participated in emergency relief activities after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. In late 2020 the organization also took part in a countrywide project of emergency rice donation for Vietnamese immigrants stranded in Japan due to the pandemic in collaboration with the Vietnamese Buddhist Association. This paper argues that connections between organizations and individuals through food incentivise the creation of support networks that are not a temporary response to a crisis but could have a more long-term effect. If crisis could “eats away” individuals (Knight 2021), sharing of vulnerabilities and trans-regional networks created by food production and circulation could create belonging and impulse toward redirection and renewal of Buddhist and local communities.
Paper short abstract:
China has a long history of the religiously motivated abstention from meat. Drawing on two case studies, this presentation explores how engaging with this powerful discourse transformed Buddhist practice throughout the first half of the 20th century and in the 21st.
Paper long abstract:
China has a long history of the religiously motivated abstention from meat, most prominently in its Buddhist inspired form. Vegetarianism is charged with multiple meanings related to religious merit, health and longevity, but also salvation and magical power. Drawing on two case studies from the interwar period and today, this presentation explores how engaging with this powerful discourse transformed Buddhist practice throughout the first half of the 20th century and in the 21st. It considers the potential of vegetarian practices and discourses to challenge anthropocentric frameworks and to promote new and more inclusive forms of multi-species democracy as well as the creation of a Buddhist-inspired ecological view of the relations between humans and non-human animals.