Abstract
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.
Highlights
In June 2017, members of Myōkōji,1 a midsize True Pure Land temple in rural Hiroshima Prefecture, visited Kyoto for their annual trip to the grave of the founder of their Buddhist sect
Drawing on two different Buddhist contexts, we argue that women deploy the gendered currency of food literacy and draw on its aesthetic capacities to generate religious belonging
Our material comes from two separate periods of ethnographic fieldwork: with True Pure Land temple communities in Hiroshima Prefecture in 2016– 2017, and with ILAB in Tokyo in 2017
Summary
In June 2017, members of Myōkōji, a midsize True Pure Land temple in rural Hiroshima Prefecture, visited Kyoto for their annual trip to the grave of the founder of their Buddhist sect. Once the plates had been cleared away, the participants followed their meal with a Buddhist prayer, with over thirty voices, primarily of women, rising to envelop the raised dais where they sat, flowing out through the thin curtains into the restaurant beyond to bless the other diners’ food These carefully crafted Buddhist feasts reveal how knowledge and practices concerning food, and their associated aesthetics, understood as sensorial processes of meaning-and-value-making, can generate senses of belonging and articulate its boundaries. With the help of Watanabe, she learned how to enjoy her food correctly, pulling her more closely into Watanabe’s Buddhist universe Women in both instances attempted to negotiate particular senses of Buddhist belonging by drawing on knowledge and practices surrounding food. The ILAB context focuses on a nonsectarian collective of Buddhist nuns, female priests, leaders of lay branches of larger sects, lay practitioners, and women interested in learning about Buddhism, drawn primarily from urban Japan and the global Buddhist community
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