When The Gods Speak With Their Mouths Full
“Emphasis on elevated modes of religious conduct and discourse has overshadowed the less lofty aspects of religious experiences” (Rose, 2018, para. 1)
Food has always been a bridge between the human and the divine, with ritual offering, sacrifice, and the consumption of the blessed body foundational to the fostering of connection between us and Them. But the fluidity and diversity in the micro practices which go into the preparation of this food, and the reflected ethnographic conclusions we draw from such observations are at the root of Elizabeth Perez’s studies of Lucumíc tradition, and are alive and well today on the south side of Chicago. Perez not only illuminates these marginalized rituals of preparation but seeks to amplify their reclamation after centuries of European colonial corruption, with the kitchen the primary site of worship and ritual in the micro practice, but a critical site of restoration in the macro practice.
Perez makes a comprehensive argument that worship, irrespective of tradition but with particular emphasis within West African and Santoria-focused cultures is an inherently sensorial experience. One where taste has been universally marginalized by monotheistic traditions. In observing, illuminating, and publicizing the micro practices which infuse the preparation of food in these rituals, from butchery to baking and plucking to poaching, Perez explores how these behaviors season practitioners into inter-generational ritualized habituation, and how ultimately hunger, thirst and the pleasures of food are important shared traits between humans and the divine, with the tongue serving as a critical liminal threshold (Perez, 2016, p. 55).
But in revealing these intimate, private practices, do we diminish their value? Is the very ethnographic observation of difference still inherently a technique of the colonial reinforcement of difference? What might the ethical implications be of such work in making a very private ritual public to non-practitioners? To what extent are scholars authorized to conduct such work?
While Perez is incredibly respectful in her embedded observations, ultimately, she’s still articulating a discussion of difference. We as co-observers in our reading of her work draw more of a qualitative distinction than she does herself, but it is still Perez who is framing the edges of this comparison, and we are complicit in this observation. It aspires to a divine exploration of universality, but it’s still us and them. Perez offers diversity of faith as ethnographically fascinating, but still positions it as unusual, and in opposition to the established practices of monotheistic ritual.
Anthropologies of religion are like historiographies of events. These aren’t just about rites of passage but help to surface differing portrayals of what religious belief can even be in different cultures. In the case of Lucumí, these traditions don’t require a textual basis, or fixed venues of worship such as churches or synagogues, but they also don’t require predominantly male leadership, with women in many more authoritative, powerful roles (Finver, 2020). These traditions can involve phenomena such as spirit possession and other experiences where the division of contact between the divine and the human is ritually eroded. In her observations of the Ilé Loroye home temple, a place of worship for a community of black Chicagoans who, as adults embraced Lucumí, an adaptation of West African Santoria created under Spanish rule in Cuba, Perez explores the choreography of cooking as a means of drawing closer to God and communing with the departed.
Within this choreography, Perez observes rhythmic movements internalized by its practitioners (Perez, 2016, p. 93), and how the creation of the intimate spaces of kitchen and preparation create an aura of quiet storytelling which has often been marginalized within the history of religious scholarship. Whereas in monotheistic religions we tend to focus on larger transformational macro practice rites of privileged passage such as baptism, confirmation, marriage or eucharistic ceremonies, Perez seeks to illuminate what’s happening in the everyday micro practices performed by everyone in the preparation of what we’ll consume in bringing ourselves closer to a larger organizing force. That Lucumí tradition explicitly does not seek to stake its transformative power upon the macro practice of public rites of passage. That these Caribbean traditions of mediumship, of accessing not just the divine but the spirits of those who’ve died, as she says, those still ‘available’ to practitioners (Finver, 2020), take root in The United States through migration and immigration, settling into distinct communities predicated upon the continued expansion of the religious freedom on which the country was founded.
But whereas practitioners in Ilé Loroye may think of West African tradition as the source of their belief, they very often also treat Cuba as a site of pilgrimage (Finver, 2020). Importantly, these connections to source seek to purify the tradition of its colonial corruptions and reclaim orisha worship from those who would seek to eliminate it or characterize it as primitive. As such, many of these micro practices have deliberately remained secretive, private, and hidden from observation and the uninitiated. Perez discusses how the micro practices of choreographed food preparation, even the ritual of informal discussion, are more consequential than we may initially observe. In doing so she frames her discussion of micro and private and macro as public. To what extent is it ethically appropriate for her to break the delineation between these two frameworks for a tradition of which she is not a practitioner?
“To understand Black Atlantic religions, one must grasp not only their ethics and aesthetics but also their synaesthetics – the somatic and emotional dimensions of practitioners’ everyday experience.” (Perez, 2016, p. 9)
Perez argues that it’s important for scholars to look at the details. The small gestures, the way in which a knife is used, the nature of how feathers are removed, or the dance of multiple participation. It’s here that sensorial experience gets prioritized in seeking to make these rituals connect directly and distinctly to the divine, a series of practices much less mediated by the need for texts, leadership, or the specific customs of western monotheism. Perez explores the reshaping of this sensorial experience which happens when observationally embedded within such a community. That this effort is messy, olfactory, visual, and tactile. It’s human.
In also including observation that Black Atlantic tradition does not follow established hierarchies of gender or sexual orientation norms we see in other traditions, Perez explains how women have an immense amount of power as diviners, dancers, herbalists and specialists (Finver, 2020). And how this power also extends to homosexuals as being important religious actors within these traditions (Perez, 2016, p. 120). These kitchens aren’t just run by women, but very often by gay men, and the articulation of this difference, in many ways an inversion of what we see in Catholicism, Islam, Judaism and other western forms of Christianity, is drawn as distinct and ethnographically valuable.
Ultimately, Perez connects her discussion back to the need for the Gods to eat. That they crave the sight of objects and the feel of hands, lips and fingertips (Perez, 2018). But whereas we may be familiar with the bovine offerings of Prometheus or the ritual consumption of the Body of Christ every Sunday morning, we still hold the details of this oral consumption at a distance, and it is this space which Perez seeks to illuminate, and specifically how Lucumíc tradition prioritizes and celebrates these micro moments. That it’s more than just the ceremonial endeavor of culinary preparation seeking to connect with the cosmologically uncanny or supernatural.
Perez argues that the study of edible things and their consumption has been marginalized in histories of worship in favor of objects, symbols, icons, acts and architecture. She draws on histories of gastronomic suspicion, which have cast the tongue as an organ of indulgence rather than as a liminal threshold between human and divine, with taste very much at the bottom of the classical sensorial hierarchy (Perez, 2018). Where the experiences of the palette are too transitory and trifling to ever be connected to any serious understanding of the universal. And explicitly how African traditions have been portrayed as captive to these fleeting passions and depicted as savage consumers of the forbidden, often characterized in the cannibalism of the boiling explorer in the cauldron (Perez, 2018). That the tactile, sensorial nature of these culinary traditions and rituals have only served to amplify the sense of difference and hierarchy between subjectively rightful and wrongful methods of worship. As such, African deities have often had to prove their validity to western observers, and in many ways these rituals enact the same thing, irrespective of cultural difference. That it is food which bridges the gap between humans and the divine, and that hunger, thirst and the pleasures of food are traits which are shared by both gods and humans. Food isn’t just the bridge between us and them, it’s also the bridge between here and the hereafter. To feed the Gods is to make them real, to make them like us, to bring back the dead, and they respond to our requests when their bellies and mouths are full. Their satisfaction is the root of our rituals of worship, with the tongue and tastebuds serving as critical thresholds. By illuminating the careful practices of preparation in ensuring this satisfaction, Perez illustrates that such colonial differences are inherently ripe for dismantling.
But is there an ethical conflict in Perez’s work illuminating what goes on behind the closed doors of Ilé Loroye? In shrinking the liminal space of micro practice and macro practice through publication, does she dilute its authority and influence? Ultimately, it’s a discussion of if we see this as a celebration of the strength of religious diversity, or a reinforcement of its difference. The dismantling of previous colonial constructs, frameworks of difference, and reclamation of the suppressed is admirable, but in these observations, there is a cost. That the private and intimate is no longer either. That the democratization of our awareness of micro practice is in itself a means of destroying it. That in sanitizing and normalizing difference, this balance remains highly delicate, something Perez handles with sensitivity in her observations.
Sensorial practices of worship are how we’ve always connected to the divine, and Perez’s reclamation of the liminal threshold of the tongue and the choreography of the kitchen, with specific connection to the Black Atlantic experience illuminates an important fluidity and diversity in what it means to believe. However, in doing so, her very observation changes these practices, and the observer effect is precarious, stirring the pot on these previously intimate, private spaces of worship.
References:
Finver, S.H. (2020). Kitchens and Constructions of Religious Subjectivity in Black Atlantic Traditions. An interview with Elizabeth Perez. The Religious Studies Project. [Audio File]. Retrieved from https://www.religiousstudiesproject.com/podcast/kitchens-and-constructions-of-religious-subjectivity-in-black-atlantic-traditions/
Perez, E. (2016). Religion in the Kitchen: Cooking, Talking, and the Making of Black Atlantic Traditions. (New York: NYU Press).
Perez, E. (2018). Soul Food and Black Atlantic Religion. YouTube.com. [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOveS4vzCZ8
Rose, K. S. (2018). Religion in the Kitchen Cooking, Talking, and the Making of Black Atlantic Traditions. Reading Religion. Retrieved from https://readingreligion.org/books/religion-kitchen.
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