Food Rules and Rituals - Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2023 - Mark McWilliams
Versatile Ritual: Structure, Resistance, and Culinary Virtuosity in the Israeli Mimouna
Food Rules and Rituals - Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2023 - Mark McWilliams
Rafi Grosglik [+]
Beit Berl College and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
André Levy [+]
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Description
Anthropological literature discussing rituals is often divided between two perspectives: the structural and often rigid aspects of ritual and a contextual perspective that emphasizes change, creativity, and innovation stemming from the changing sociopolitical and cultural ecology in which the rituals are embedded. Neither approach satisfactorily explains how rituals produce the necessary responses to their surroundings and maintain their core features, thereby remaining recognizably "the same"; ritual. In this paper, we develop a formulation of the mutual dependency between the structural and contextual levels of rituals. We focus on the 'ada – a pivotal component that drives the Mimouna ritual, a Moroccan Jewish spring holiday that takes place the day after Passover – itself characterized by ritual virtuosity. Foods, just like rituals, are matters of collective cultural production within which tensions between structure (cuisine, recipes, culinary rules, etc.) and performance (private palates, particular ways of cooking, and the like) are always at play. The 'ada – the structural component that drives the ritual practices in Mimouna festivals in Israel, particularly the culinary ones – seems to be designed according to this tension between prescription and improvisation, between observance of formal rules and deviation from these rules, and between rigidity and flexibility. We highlight the interdependence between ritual structure and context by drawing on the Israeli Mimouna ritual and its structural mechanism (the 'ada). We argue that ritual structural mechanisms may enable the incursion and influence of external (contextual) sociocultural and sociopolitical factors. To unpack this argument, we will begin our culinary ethnography of the Israeli Mimouna by contextualizing the Mimouna's origins (the mid-18th century) and evolution and transition from Morocco to Israel. Discussing the culinary aspects that form and express the 'ada in the Mimouna ritual as it moved from Morocco to Israel, we show how a structural mechanism that emphasizes divergence allows the incursion of external sociocultural and sociopolitical contexts.