In this Book
The Stranger at the Feast: Prohibition and Mediation in an Ethiopian Orthodox Christian Community
Book
2018
Published by:
University of California Press
Series:
The Anthropology of Christianity
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
summary
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The Stranger at the Feast is a pathbreaking ethnographic study of one of the world’s oldest and least-understood religious traditions. Based on long-term ethnographic research on the Zege peninsula in northern Ethiopia, the author tells the story of how people have understood large-scale religious change by following local transformations in hospitality, ritual prohibition, and feeding practices. Ethiopia has undergone radical upheaval in the transition from the imperial era of Haile Selassie to the modern secular state, but the secularization of the state has been met with the widespread revival of popular religious practice. For Orthodox Christians in Zege, everything that matters about religion comes back to how one eats and fasts with others. Boylston shows how practices of feeding and avoidance have remained central even as their meaning and purpose has dramatically changed: from a means of marking class distinctions within Orthodox society, to a marker of the difference between Orthodox Christians and other religions within the contemporary Ethiopian state.
The Stranger at the Feast is a pathbreaking ethnographic study of one of the world’s oldest and least-understood religious traditions. Based on long-term ethnographic research on the Zege peninsula in northern Ethiopia, the author tells the story of how people have understood large-scale religious change by following local transformations in hospitality, ritual prohibition, and feeding practices. Ethiopia has undergone radical upheaval in the transition from the imperial era of Haile Selassie to the modern secular state, but the secularization of the state has been met with the widespread revival of popular religious practice. For Orthodox Christians in Zege, everything that matters about religion comes back to how one eats and fasts with others. Boylston shows how practices of feeding and avoidance have remained central even as their meaning and purpose has dramatically changed: from a means of marking class distinctions within Orthodox society, to a marker of the difference between Orthodox Christians and other religions within the contemporary Ethiopian state.
Table of Contents
Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
Map
Note on Amharic Pronunciation and Transliteration
Acknowledgments
Introduction
pp. 1-21
1. A History of Mediation
pp. 22-36
2. Fasting, Bodies, and the Calendar
pp. 37-55
3. Proliferations of Mediators
pp. 56-71
4. Blood, Silver, and Coffee: The Material Histories of Sanctity and Slavery
pp. 72-85
5. The Buda Crisis
pp. 86-102
6. Concrete, Bones, and Feasts
pp. 103-118
7. Echoes of the Host
pp. 119-130
8. The Media Landscape
pp. 131-143
9. The Knowledge of the World
pp. 144-155
Conclusion
pp. 156-158
Reference List
pp. 159-172
Index
pp. 173-181
002
003
004
005
ISBN | 9780520968974 |
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Related ISBN(s) | 9780520296497 |
DOI | 10.1353/book.63386![]() |
MARC Record | Download |
OCLC | 1088340862 |
Pages | 194 |
Launched on MUSE | 2019-02-25 |
Language | English |
Open Access | Yes |
Creative Commons | CC-BY |