ANTH 209 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Gluttony, Transubstantiation, Ethnomedicine
13 Nov 2016
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February 18, 2016: review of previous lecture. Religion is a component of culture that includes a system of beliefs that is expressed through rituals and symbols and that is concerned with the connections between material and spiritual worlds. Religion and food: religious rituals may involve the following food practices: dietary proscriptions or food taboo and dietary prescriptions, fasting, feasting. The case of the pig taboo: two approaches (soler vs. harris: soler symbolic approach. Food taboos in general and pig taboo in particular should be seen in terms of a system of signs like language and taxonomic classificatory systems. To understand food taboos do not look into the nature of food item but. 2 how the food as a sign functions with other signs in the system. These systems of signs provide a certain kind of logic, a perception of the world (how to think about the world) and a means to identify with a social group.
