
Paulina Kolata
Postdoctoral fellow

Feasting with Buddhist Women : Food Literacy in Religious Belonging
Author
Summary, in English
This ethnographic study shows that women’s knowledge and practices involving food in Japanese Buddhist contexts circulate as gendered currency. It emphasizes how what we term “food literacy” cultivates aesthetic and affective senses of belonging among Buddhist practitioners. We argue that this embodied knowledge helps women negotiate their experiences of Buddhism and show how these experiences articulate the complexities of their bounded and self-disciplining Buddhist selves. Women use food literacy to teach, learn, and practice the way Buddhism feels and etch it into their own and others’ emotional, social, and material bodies. By recognizing women as stewards of religion, particularly through food literacy, we also elucidate how women’s uses of mundane practices illuminate food literacy as a value carrier that generates belonging through food. Such practices can equally become sites of failure to connect if the intended recipients do not share understandings or appreciations of the aesthetic and affective dimensions of it.
Department/s
- Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University
Publishing year
2021
Language
English
Pages
567-592
Publication/Series
Numen
Volume
68
Issue
5-6
Document type
Journal article
Publisher
Brill
Topic
- Religious Studies
- Gender Studies
- Social Anthropology
Keywords
- Buddhism
- Buddhist women
- Japanese Buddhism
- Japan
- food literacy
- religious belonging
- affect
- gendered currency
- gender
Status
Published
ISBN/ISSN/Other
- ISSN: 1568-5276