Commensality as citizenship. An Ethnographic Journey through Food and Migration

This introduction to the special issue Food, Migration, Passages. Foodways which are brought and met, outlines encounters and misunderstandings between Migra-tion Studies and Food Studies. Focusing on the ambivalent power relations in both doing and writing ethnographies, we discuss the increasing concern for the analysis of the way in which material and cultural dimensions in food practices intertwine. The metaphor and reality of migrants' "food suitcase", and the journey it makes, is used to consider analogies between commensality/conviviality in food dynamics and citizenship processes. The individual and collective acts of commensali-ty/conviviality define boundaries through secular rituals and normative require-ments, in the same way as citizenship policies define territorial and legal borders limit the inclusion of migrants. Food that circulates, in the next six articles, mirrors the inequalities and interdependencies of the subjects involved, as well as their dif-ferent possibilities of agency

United on Sunday: The effects of secular rituals on social bonding and affect

Religious rituals are associated with health benefits, potentially produced via social bonding. It is unknown whether secular rituals similarly increase social bonding. We conducted a field study with individuals who celebrate secular rituals at Sunday Assemblies and compared them with participants attending Christian rituals. We assessed levels of social bonding and affect before and after the rituals. Results showed the increase in social bonding taking place in secular rituals is comparable to religious rituals. We also found that both sets of rituals increased positive affect and decreased negative affect, and that the change in positive affect predicted the change in social bonding observed. Together these results suggest that secular rituals might play a similar role to religious ones in fostering feelings of social connection and boosting positive affect.

When Alterations are Violations: Moral Outrage and Punishment in Response to (Even Minor) Alterations to Rituals

From Catholics performing the sign of the cross since the fourth century to Americans reciting the Pledge of Allegiance since the 1890s, group rituals (i.e., predefined sequences of symbolic actions) have strikingly consistent features over time. Seven studies (N = 4,213) document the sacrosanct nature of rituals: Because group rituals symbolize sacred group values, even minor alterations to them provoke moral outrage and punishment. In Pilot Studies A and B, fraternity members who failed to complete initiation activities that were more ritualistic elicited relatively greater moral outrage and hazing from their fraternity brothers. Study 1 uses secular holiday rituals to explore the dimensions of ritual alteration—both physical and psychological—that elicit moral outrage. Study 2 demonstrates that altering a ritual elicits outrage even beyond the extent to which the ritual alteration is seen as violating descriptive and injunctive norms. In Study 3, group members who viewed male circumcision as more ritualistic (i.e., Jewish versus Muslim participants) expressed greater moral outrage in response to a proposal to alter circumcision to make it safer. Study 4 uses the Pledge of Allegiance ritual to explore how the intentions of the person altering the ritual influence observers’ moral outrage and punishment. Finally, in Study 5, even minor alterations elicited comparable levels of moral outrage to major alterations of the Jewish Passover ritual. Across both religious and secular rituals, the more ingroup members believed that rituals symbolize sacred group values, the more they protected their rituals—by punishing those who violate them.

United on Sunday: The effects of secular rituals on social bonding and affect

Religious rituals are associated with health benefits, potentially produced via social bonding. It is unknown whether secular rituals similarly increase social bonding. We conducted a field study with individuals who celebrate secular rituals at Sunday Assemblies and compared them with participants attending Christian rituals. We assessed levels of social bonding and affect before and after the rituals. Results showed the increase in social bonding taking place in secular rituals is comparable to religious rituals. We also found that both sets of rituals increased positive affect and decreased negative affect and that the change in positive affect predicted the change in social bonding observed. Together these results suggest that secular rituals play a similar role to religious ones in fostering feelings of social connection and boosting positive affect.

Civility and Civil Religion before and after the French Revolution: Religious and Secular Rituals in Hume and Tocqueville

In his critique of religion, Hume envisages forms of religious ritual disconnected from the superstitious “neurotic” mindset; he considers simple rituals fostering moderation. In this paper, I claim that one can profitably interpret Hume’s obsession with secular rituals, such as French highly ceremonial manners, in the sense of anxiety-soothing institutions that bind citizenry without the appeal to a civil religion, properly speaking. Let us call this path the Old Regime’s civil ritualism”. Overall, Tocqueville conceives rituals in a Humean spirit, as existential anxiety-soothing institutions. Moving beyond the Humean line of thought, he focuses on the ambiguous role of religious rituals in the context of democratic faith and the Christian civil religion that he deems appropriate for the US. Yet, he also detects novel forms of superstition firmly embedded in secular, democratic faith.

Liberating language and concepts of the divine in contemporary hymnody

This article will examine from an auto-ethnographic perspective the language of hymnody and how it has developed over the last 25 years through the period of secularisation and postsecularisation. It will interrogate and analyse the words used for the Divine in a drive towards an inclusive language approach to God. It will look at the arguments of feminist theologians towards feminine images for the Divine and then how far these images will be acceptable in secular contexts, especially in secular rituals that include people from a variety of belief backgrounds in a post-secular world. It will use examples from woman writers and draw on the author’s experience of revising her own hymns for a variety of contexts. These will be interrogated in the light of debates around spiritual but not religious, multifaith dialogue and post-secularisation. It will look at a variety of approaches to the Christian narrative in contemporary UK – devotional, cultural and story – examining the language appropriate for these various approaches and various contexts.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: Hymnology crosses the disciplines of music, theology, liturgy and ritual (sacred and secular) and has implications for all these areas, especially Church liturgy and sacred music in secular contexts. It is lyrical theology, which spans the arts and theology and expresses theological ideas in an artistic form.

Dancing for Human Rights: Engaging Labor Rights and Social Remembrance in Poor Mouth

There is a tradition of dance artists developing work for the concert stage in order to engage pressing social justice issues and, more specifically, the abuse of human rights. Anna Sokolow's Strange American Funeral (1935), Pearl Primus' Strange Fruit (1945), Katherine Dunham's Southland (1951), Alvin Ailey's Masekela Langage (1969), Jawole Willa Jo Zollar's Womb Wars (1992), William Forsythe's Human Writes (2005), and Douglas Wright's Black Milk (2006) are examples of acclaimed dances that address the manner in which marginalized individuals and social groups have not been granted equal ethical or political consideration. 1 In this essay I consider how dance enacts secular rituals of remembrance for victims of human rights abuses characteristic of a particular community's or nation's historical legacy. This entails discussion of aesthetic strategies used to portray human rights abuse, a consideration of the ethics of memory, and analysis of specific dance work. I discuss my site-adaptive work Poor Mouth (2013) which centers on labor rights issues in the American South during the Great Depression and I argue that dance which presents such issues performs a valuable social function as it encourages audiences to remember the past in a manner that facilitates a historically informed understanding of communal identity. Further, since historical instances of human rights abuse often have contemporary correlates and since remembrance affects the significance of places associated with the history in question, the implications of such work temporally and spatially extend beyond the performance venue and thereby contribute to political discourse in the public sphere. Dance intersects with human rights issues in many ways, but here I focus on dances intended for performance on the concert stage. For the purposes of this essay, the terms ‘dance activism’ and ‘political dance’ refer to dances that intentionally grapple with explicit human rights abuses and that are intended to be performed for a theatre-going audience. Along the way I note what bearing my points have for other forms such as popular dance, dance used in acts of public political protest, site-specific dance, and dance therapy, but I should emphasize that it is beyond the scope of this essay to consider the many ways that dance intersects with human rights and with political activism more generally. Lastly, I should say that my approach to this topic is informed by the personal experience of collaboratively creating and performing dance work in a particular community and that it is interdisciplinary in nature since its draw on aspects of philosophical ethics in order to reflect on that experience.