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Religion in the Kitchen: "Cooking, Talking, and the Making of Black Atlantic Traditions"

Online ISBN:
9781479803217
Print ISBN:
9781479861613
Publisher:
NYU Press
Book

Religion in the Kitchen: "Cooking, Talking, and the Making of Black Atlantic Traditions"

Elizabeth Pérez
Elizabeth Pérez
Darthmouth College
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Published:
16 February 2016
Online ISBN:
9781479803217
Print ISBN:
9781479861613
Publisher:
NYU Press

Abstract

This book argues that cooking and talking are at the very quick of Black Atlantic religions. It shows that tasks like butchering, although manual, are far from menial, and “idle chatter” does a surprising amount of heavy lifting in Afro-Diasporic houses of worship. Its thesis is that such activities get under the skin of practitioners, equipping them with the repertoire of skills, dispositions, and habits necessary for religious norms to be internalized, then reproduced. The book maintains that to understand Black Atlantic religions, one must grasp not only their ethics and aesthetics but also their synaesthetics—the somatic and emotional dimensions of everyday experience. The book centers on two commonplace yet transformative kinds of kitchen work and talk: preparation of food for the gods and narration of stories about ritual experience. These undertakings are best described as “micropractices.” Micropractices like plucking chickens and trading anecdotes not only organize space, time, and intensities of affect for participants; they also progressively implicate their performers in the material and conceptual worlds of religious authorities.Indeed, the book demonstrates that individuals are transformed into religious subjects through their enactment of micropractices at the interstices of better-known rituals. Furthermore, in seeking to provide a more accurate understanding of women and gay men—particularly those deemed effeminate—as social actors within Afro-Diasporic houses of worship, it reconceptualizes the role of race, gender, and sexuality in religious subjectivity.

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