Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Bernardo Brown, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

Rituals generally serve to effectively intervene in the world with the aim of improving a certain situation, be it healing rites, life-cycle transitions, or harvest ceremonies. In the ritual process, various energies, forces, materials, images, sounds, and smells are mobilized to generate a human/non-human collaboration and mediation to bring about desired changes. Food becomes a focal point of this collaboration as it condenses these existential concerns, heterogeneous relations, and processes of transformation in an almost holographic way by way of which food turns into a very potent agent of ritual action. As such, the transforming food condenses, materializes, enacts, and effectuates the alteration taking place in the person whose cosmos simultaneously gets renewed in this collaborative action of the human and non-human ritual participants. Two rites are illustrative of this in their specific way. The Sātuwe antisorcery rite seeks to re-establish the afflicted person as a re-born, healed, and free agent by collaborating with food that helps removing the incarcerating ties of the hungry ghosts. As a different complex set of rites, the Sinhalese New Year involves the ritual cooking and sharing of specific foods to bring about different stages of the annual regeneration of life and its interrelations as to achieve overall prosperity and happiness. Hence, the ritual process of condensation, mediation, transformation and genesis of renewed personhood and cosmos as almost holographically condensed, materialized, and enacted by food occurs throughout most rites and as such it striking that food has often been undertreated as a focus of analysis in ritual studies.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Combining study and work at an organic farm and a few NGOs, Wim Van Daele obtained a Master of Social and Cultural Anthropology in 2001 and Postgraduate degree in Cultures and Development Studies in 2005 at the University of Leuven in Belgium. In 2013, he obtained greatest distinction in his joint PhD, combining Interdisciplinary Studies at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Comparative Science of Cultures at Ghent University. During his PhD, Wim spent altogether 6 months at the University of Chicago and 9 months at the SOAS food studies center where he is currently an external research associate. In his PhD Wim studied the ways in which food shapes Sri Lankan life throughout its everyday, ritual, medical and political-economic tropes. Currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oslo, he builds further on his former work by conducting field research on the food and health nexus in Sri Lanka as part of the ERC-funded “Overheating” project, headed by Thomas Hylland Eriksen.

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