Faith Foodways In Africa and Asia

Religion continues to be a powerful force in rapidly developing societies in Africa and Asia. Buddhist, Hindu and Islamic revivals have reinvigorated many postcolonial societies, even threatening religious nationalisms and the formation of majoritarian states, while Christianity, especially its indigenous Pentecostal and charismatic variants, has been making significant inroads in ethnic communities practicing indigenous religions. Religious developments are driving ongoing secular translations, and we see this in the foodways that are evolving endogenously with local adaptations of ethno-religious traditions as well as exogenously with the globalization of popular food culture and culinary consumerism. Based on our exploratory study of changing faith foodways in Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Singapore), where we observed the growth of Halal and vegetarian food industries and Christian-themed food businesses, we ask the following questions. What contemporary religious practices, discourses and identities are driving these trending foodways? How are the changing foodways interacting with secular states, religious pluralisms and popular culture? How are they shaping inter-religious relationships as well as secularism in their societies? How are these faith foodways constituting transnational mobilities of people, ideas, beliefs and practices and their cultural politics? How are faith foodways addressing and impacting global poverty, food insufficiency, injustice and insecurity? We invite papers that take a relational comparative approach to understand empirical cases of faith foodways in the sub-regions of Africa and Asia, so that we can address these questions in a dialogical manner and establish the study of faith foodways as cutting-edge subfield in the sociology of religion.