Smells and Bells

Image from http://johnmccallum.blogspot.com/2011/06/sleeping-in-church.html In Public Speaking class this semester, I am learning about my strengths and weaknesses in giving presentations. After my Speech of Introduction, my professor (Jennifer Madden, who is fantastic by the way), told me in my feedback that I have a pleasing vocal quality. This was a nice compliment, but I had never really considered it to be true. I’ve heard my voice in videos (like the YouTube tour I filmed that has over 13,000 views…gulp), podcasts, and the like, and I simply feel that it sounds like a little kid’s voice. This week, when learning about recitation through Rasmussen’s piece, I thought back to the voices and vocal qualities that I have heard in religious settings.   There are three people that I would like to introduce you to. First, my priest, who I will refer to as “OP” (original priest). OP has been serving mass for as long as I can remember. He baptized me and all of my siblings, confirm...

This week, in particular, I have been thinking a lot about the importance of my faith and hearing God's word. From experience, I believe that to have religion in your life is so important, especially in times of sorrow, doubt, and fear. While reading Rasmussen's book, I thought about how wonderful it is to hear God's word through music. In the Protestant church we have hymns so I can appreciate the musical religious practices. The emotions that surface while hearing music in a religious setting are intense and can bring on powerful memories. Any time I hear the hymn Were You There (When They Crucified My Lord?) I tear up, no matter what. Listening to religious singing is such a wonderful thing to experience in faith. http://faithisland.org/faith/hearing-the-voice-of-god/ I am currently going through a bit of a rough patch in my personal life and I have been getting a lot of guidance from people. Listening to the advice I am given has been helping so much. My parents, frien...

 I found this part of the book very interesting. The information about the food, "ocha", was very surprising to me. It was thought as being a food that would change your life for the better after making it. At this time, it was very expensive to make "ocha." In fact, the cost of materials and personnel needed to make ocha came with a financial burden that was passed down to other family members. I found this to be shocking and hard to understand. 

My initial thinking before the reading was how taste related to religion. I found it interesting how much food was intertwined with religion. For example in Christian Communion or Hindu deity feedings, good is an important factor in religious discourse. To taste something is an immediate and individual reaction to who consumes it. This reaction changes and varies from person to person. Some people like certain foods while other people can't stand those same foods.      When we talked about what god tastes like I got really confused. Especially because different people had different tastes when they described such metaphors. However after reading more, I kind of understand it now. For me god's  taste isn't necessarily what he tastes like but how you feel when you taste something. It's like blessing your meal before your eating, since your food has been blessed it's like eating a piece of god yourself. 

      I love to cook. I sit down, looking through all of the 48 cookbooks in my house. Not just to look for something to make for dinner, but to get inspired. I get inspired by the flavors and colors of the food to create new art pieces, to relax. Cooking is somehow both so exciting and so stressful. It's exciting because I can create something that I can enjoy making, seeing the foods transform and evolve using spices, heat, cold, and they become this symphony of flavors and textures, almost like a gorgeous design in a fabric. Regardless of if I'm cooking for one person or for my family or friends, cooking is so vibrant. I dance across the kitchen looking for spices or flavors that you have to bring out by tending to the food like a small child. I often cook for my family, such as eggs benedict, crab stuffed salmon, and more. As a person who is Deaf and colorblind, cooking is a creative way for me to create something without needing some sort of accommodation, such as he...

The term is an oxymoron. Sacrality implies (at least in the salvation religions dominant in Western and Near Eastern history), a meaning rooted in a cosmic frame that transcends any immediate sensed from. The sacred cannot, therefore, be “performed.” Any reduction of meaning to form deprives that form of meaning. To perform the “sacred” necessarily is to profane it. Yet the sacred becomes real only as embodied in form. (1990, 208) This quote from Peacock in chapter three, page 119, of Rasmussen's book really intrigued me. It's sort of a different take than what I recently read in Exploring Judaism: A Reconstructionist Approach  by Rebecca Alpert and Jacob Staub. There's an entire chapter on Mordechai Kaplan's transnaturalist perspective that I was reminded of in this section. Kaplan's view was more so that God is found in the process, "God works through  us rather than upon us" ( Exploring Judaism , 20). I can't exactly remember if the phrase 'God...

  In class so far we have discussed the different religious connections that can be made through the senses in it's believers, but what about gods?  In Elizabeth Pérez's book Religion in the Kitchen: Cooking, Talking, and the Making of Black Atlantic Traditions  she states that Caribbean gods do have senses, and that they love to experience symbols and gestures. Pérez states that their love of food dictates the ceremonial calendars of religious individuals and families and all of the labor and ritual that is involved. It is a very common thing for people among faiths from around the world to offer food to their gods, but I feel that as Westerners we rarely think about deities or God to experience the senses like we do. Pérez's book opened my eyes to a way of interpreting and understanding gods or God that I have never thought or known of. Although I am unreligious myself I realize that my assumption was that most people thought gods to be otherworldly beings that had no i...

    Anne Rasmussen in her chapter, "Celebrating Religion and Nation," Women, The Recited Qur’an, and Islamic Musi c in Indonesia discussed gender, performance, and ritual through music in the Islam religion and culture. I really enjoyed this reading as it discussed not only the beautiful music and sounds of the Islam religion but delved into how the public setting of this ritual “decontextualized” the religious aspect of the ritual.  Rasmussen mentioned how at first she felt like this was sacrilegious, particularly the competition aspect. As someone that is not religious, I think this is really interesting and a great way to involve more community engagement with people outside the religion. The public access makes the performance, songs, and music in this case, more artistic and more dynamic, as it is out in the open for all to hear, and not just a closed-off space for only certain individuals. The performance aspect also allowed women within the space that they usually...

    Because I forgot to do this post before spring break, Purim has now passed. And because of that and our presentation on taste, I've been thinking a lot about cookies. I've been making hamantaschen every year for Purim since I was sixteen? Seventeen? I don't know, young enough that it's been a while, but old enough that I was the one who taught myself how to make them. Well, a Jewish food blog taught me how to make them, but same difference. I was genuinely thinking about Perez' book while making them this year, especially how in the Lucumi religion, it's important to be a part of the preparation of food. To be honest, I don't know how to cook. Neither of my parents were big chefs and I never tried all that hard to learn, so my talents don't extend far past pasta and grilled cheese. Baking has always been much easier (I think someone in class compared baking to science and cooking to art? I stand by that) and I've always had a big sweet tooth, so...

  When I watch the Great British Bake Off/Baking Show (which, admittedly isn't that often, but when such an occasion occurs, for example, when my housemates or friends watch it) I can practically sniff the ingredients through the screen. I've always been good at picking apart ingredients just through my nose, though no one should ever dare test me on that. When I walk into a Subway or any deli, I melt. No, it's not the roast beef or meatballs, it's the smell of Italian Herb & Cheese bread. Italian seasoning, with its oregano, basil and thyme; they're all very distinct scents that have always stood out to me, along with baked bread in general, which leads to no surprise that one of my favorite places to exist in is When Pigs Fly. There are so many loaves of bread. So many oils and jams. I could pick apart the herbs in a focaccia, and one particular scent that I can always identify is rosemary. I have at least two people that can fact-check me on this, that have b...

Cooking is a religious experience- that we have established so far, but in this way of being religious, it also becomes a communal one. However, the concept I found most fascinating is Ortiz's transculturality being applied to cooking. Within Religion in the Kitchen, Perez discusses this idea of transculturality in relation to food- how in Cuban culture there is a great presence of African meat that is then seasoned with various Cuban spices. Through globalization we can  Cooking varies greatly throughout the world, and kitchens present themselves in numerous ways around the world as well, but there is no denying that over time cooking and kitchens have embodied transculturality. Transculturation in the kitchen appears in my life in many places and in various ways.                                                I'm from Queens, New York. My loc...

       I find it quite interesting the ways in which humans can use physical items to represent non-physical ideas or beliefs. Perez describes the ways that people of the Afro-Caribbean religion Lucumi use food that they themselves prepared to appeal to and strengthen their connection to their deities, the Orishas, and the spiritual realm. Some claim that when the offerings are taken back they weigh less than they had before being given out to the Orisha, although in most cases it cannot be physically noted in any way that these offerings are being interacted with and appreciated (unless someone is possessed and eats the food as the deity in the body of one of the followers). Despite this, the practice is still incredibly important and relevant to their usual rituals.  Lucumi man performing a religious ritual https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-1-4614-6086-2_9109      Seeing and eating is said to overlap metaphorically in rela...

 While the vast majority of the most intricate rituals described by Perez in the text were the cooking done for the Orisha, a variety of things were practiced by the Lucumi that she spent time with also practiced a form of ancestor worship as part of their religion, which involved offering a part of the food that they cooked to each of the ancestors present, a process with it's own unique and intricate ritual practices and taboos. While this is a very formal way of food being used to connect with the deceased, it's definitely not the only example of it that springs to mind when I think on the concept.  Personally, the first thing that I think of when it comes to food and to the dead, together, is a friend of the families who passed away when I was in high school. She wasn't someone I was particularly close to, the mother of my mom's best friend who I saw maybe once or twice a year when she came to Massachusetts to visit her daughter and Grandchildren. She was close enou...

   Image by Andreas Schalber https://www.bischoferhaus.at/en/ Much like Aroma of righteousness , Religion in the Kitchen was a new reading experience for me. And once again, that is far from a bad thing. While admittedly I could never really see myself or any of the people of color I know taking part in Lucumi, I could definitely see them being inspired by it's practices much in the same way I was. The book does an amazing job going over the history, beliefs, and origins of Lucumi as it made its way to the states.  What really got my attention though was the section in the book about kitchen roles and how in Lucumi, men handle the 4-legged animals for food while women handle the 2-legged ones. Switching the roles or having both genders do both types of work seems to be okay for some Lucumi communities but just flat out wrong sounding for others like that one cuban priestess named Elaina comes from. Afterwards, the section goes on in detail about all the different roles e...

Image Courtesy: https://ashepamicuba.com/en/que-son-los-orishas/ Elizabeth Peréz’s Religion in the Kitchen opened my eyes to a culture I was unfamiliar with, and I was amazed by what I learned. I knew very little about Black Atlantic religions, and I felt that this book, with it’s rich descriptions of the kitchen as a place of religious practice, the preparation and use for the food, and the roles and micropractices of everyone involved, was an excellent and thorough introduction to Lucumí culture (as thorough as can be without actually going to Chicago and breathing it all in). At times I was surprised by the intensity, attention to detail, social hierarchies and traditions that were associated with the food prepared for the orishas and other members of Ilé Laroye. I think this is because I was not raised in a particularly religious environment, and as a child I rarely ever thanked God or a high power for a meal. In my house, food was mainly just cooked for necessity, and only fo...

I do not follow a particular religion as I have never been raised to do so, and after our conversations regarding the ways in which religion is sometimes placed upon people forcefully or simply unwantedly, I began to think about how my parents sort of intended there to be an absence of religion.  We have our beliefs surely, but I never attended church or Sunday school or religious youth groups which I’ve heard many people share their not so fond memories of but still somehow felt like I was missing out. Religion quite literally rules the world in lots of ways, and I have had so many thoughts like “what the heck, how am I not involved in anything??”  And then I was comforted by some of our discussions on how Perez emphasizes the ways in which religion is present in cooking. I don’t cook for Orishas or deities or necessarily think of any spiritual beings while cooking but I surely can resonate with the emotions, forms of thinking, and the beauty of conversation evoked through co...

     I found this book quite interesting, not only for the fact of Perez's colorful and descriptive language but the fact that is was an ethnography. While I know an ethnography doesn't have much to do with religion it strikes me because I am currently trying to make my own ethnograph for my English class. This gave me an idea of how I wanted t do my own ethnography. Something else I really enjoyed was that unlike the other books we have read she submersed herself in this culture and let people from the culture show and describe what it is like from an inside point of view, which I think others, like Ackerman, were not able to do!

Not even getting into matters of taste, I was quickly and rapidly fascinated by the Ilé  Laroye. Maybe I’m so used to the idea of inherited, compulsory religion common in white, and especially Southern white, families. My father was a Christian, specifically a Baptist (I believe? Or, at the very least, the church I remember us going to is Baptist, according to Google), and I assume his parents were also the same, and so I was also expected to fall within that faith. I never took to it, of course, something which I’m sure my father has not informed the rest of my family of given they never mentioned it and I definitely feel they would have. Then again, that isn’t the only thing in my life they would disapprove of, so I guess that might be the least harmful thing for them to bother me over. In any case, that’s the religious experience I was used to, with children being forced to go along with their parents’ beliefs and many were just unquestioning of their Christianity because it was...

  Interesting start, comparing perspective vs taste, but ugh, I hate the term umami, especially the definition Fulton gives it. Just call it savory, please. Taste is already subjective enough without slapping the word “delicious” on it. That particular griping aside, it seems at first as if Fulton is almost demonizing taste, (although this isn’t really the case later on), because of some of her word choices. Beyond taste just being “threatening” (Fulton 170), something about her rhetoric just rubs me the wrong way on pages 172-173. I firmly believe that almost everything deserves to be tried once (within reason, obviously), and the way in which she described tasting things as being potentially dangerous not only because something might be nauseating, but because it might be delicious, I just can’t agree with. Life’s a gamble, regardless of whether you believe in fate, God’s plan, or random chance, and anything could happen at any time, so why the fuck not eat weird shit? I will...