FOOD ETHICS IN BIBLE BANQUETS: PASSAGE, COMMUNION AND POWER
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12957/demetra.2016.15976Keywords:
Banquet. Commensality. Sociability. Culture. Religion.Abstract
Banquets, since ancient times, have offered elements to reflect on the passage from nature to culture operated via commensality within the human cuisine. And the Bible, as a literary work, the greater influence on the formation of Western culture, leaves clues for understanding the movements that have instituted the practice of sociability around food, helping us to reflect how they echo in our current practices. Thus, this article aims to understand the ethics constituting banquets described in the biblical text, taking the Bible as a corpus. Text analyses were performed according to the proposal by Bauer and Gaskell (2002). The results pointed to three types of behavior governing the acts of food sharing: (1) the ethics of passage, which serves as a sign of change in collective or individual lives; (2) the ethics of communion, which creates a sphere of shared values, achievements, ideals, care favoring someone or a people, aiming at a political end; and (3) the ethics of power, sharing that engenders relations of agreement, demonstration of power via the production of images of abundance and drawing a distinction between the sovereign and the subjects. From this perspective, thinking of food involves focusing not only on the nutritional components, but thinking of the symbols, the collective imagination, sociability – in short, issues that pervade humanity. This raises challenges and the need to build an Anthropology of Nutrition.
DOI: 10.12957/demetra.2016.15976
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