Paper short abstract:

In this presentation we examine how local religious beliefs are enacted in the local diet and how local perceptions corresponding to the binary opposition 'purity/impurity' are instantiated within the culinary sphere through fast in an effective manner that supports both stability and change.

Paper long abstract:

Based on ethnographic material gathered from a town in Eastern Crete, this paper examines how local religious beliefs are enacted in the local diet and, in particular, how local perceptions corresponding to the binary opposition 'purity/impurity' are instantiated within the culinary sphere in an effective manner that supports both stability and change.

Food relates both to the tangible world, as it includes materials and their transformation, and to the intangible, as it invokes concepts, values and traditions expressed, embodied or enacted. Focusing on food related religious experiences, and fasting in particular, we argue that changes in food related religious practices may be interpreted in part as adaptive strategies of the local people in their effort to respond to the dynamics of cultural change. Fasting and its opposite, feasting, are part of local knowledge as culinary enactments of a local religious belief system.

The dynamics of culture are shown in the strategies local people employ to mediate change or adapt to the new circumstances that emerge, especially in the modern globalised world in crisis. The category of fasting/Lenten food helps people deal with change and maintain stability since what they categorise as a "traditional" diet includes edibles linked mainly to fasts. Food related knowledge is coded and manipulated in order to re-produce a familiar and well established ideational frame for people to process their surroundings and negotiate change.