Buddhist women; Japanese Buddhism; food literacy; religious belonging; affect; gendered currency
摘要
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.
目次
Abstract 567 1. The Aesthetic Capacities of Food Literacy 570 2. Gendered Currency in Circulation 573 3. The Boundedness of Gendered Currency 578 4. Negotiating Food Literacy through Self-Discipline 583 5. Conclusion 588 Acknowledgments 589 References 590
