Feasting with Buddhist Women: Food Literacy in Religious Belonging

Abstract

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.

Pennies From the Pure Land: Practicing the Dharma, Hanging Out, and Raising Funds for the Oldest Buddhist Temple Outside Asia

“…(1996): 4; "Fujinkai News." (1995): 6; "Sunflowers 4-h Club Project" ( 2000 Kolata and Gillson (2021), who, in turn, build their ideas about micropractices on the discussion in Pérez (2016). 15 Former scouts of 1961 on the lists of Multi-Purpose Complex donors include Glenn Kimura, Clyde Nishioka, Lloyd Tada, and Barry Taniguchi.…”