Dr. Elizabeth Pérez discusses practices of embodied knowledge production and transmission in such Afro-Diasporic religions as Cuban Lucumí, Haitian Vodou, and Brazilian Candomblé. In conversation with CSWR Research Associate Dr. Giovanna Parmigiani, she connects the insights from her first book on sacred food preparation with current scholarship on gut feelings, knowing, and beings in Black Atlantic traditions. Distinguishing between intellectual comprehension and the types of understanding that practitioners derive from ritual experience, Dr. Elizabeth Pérez explains that the connections between the belly and the brain have only begun to be explored in Black Atlantic traditions.
Elizabeth Pérez is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her first book, Religion in the Kitchen: Cooking, Talking, and the Making of Black Atlantic Traditions (NYU Press, 2016) was awarded the 2017 Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion, and received honorable mention for the 2019 Barbara T. Christian Literary Award. She has published widely in scholarly journals and edited volumes.
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School
SPEAKER 2: Gut and Other Knowledges in Religions of the African Diaspora, February 23, 2022.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Good afternoon, and welcome to our gnosiologies event. My name is Giovanna Parmigiani and I'm the host of this series organized within the Transcendence and Transformation Initiative at the CSWR, here at Harvard Divinity School.
This series focuses on ways of knowing that are often labeled as non-rational, traditionally referred to as gnoses in Western philosophical and religious traditions. And often understood in contra-opposition to science, these ways of knowing are becoming more and more influential in contemporary societies, popular culture and academic research.
Going beyond dichotomies such as body and mind, ordinary and extraordinary, reason and experience, and matter and spirit, this series will host scholars of different disciplines and practitioners interested in exploring and expanding the boundaries of what counts as knowledge today.
So it is with immense pleasure that I introduce today's guest, Professor Elizabeth Pérez. Elizabeth Pérez is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The first book, Religion in the Kitchen, Cooking, Talking, and the Making of Black Atlantic Traditions, was awarded a 2017 Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion and received Honorable Mention for the 2019 Barbara T. Christian Literary Award.
Professor Pérez has published widely in scholarly journals and edited volumes. And, in particular, I will recommend her recent publication, The Black Atlantic Metaphysics of Azealia Banks, Brujx Womanism at the Kongo Crossroads, published on the journal Hypatia. So today, Professor Ferris and I will have a conversation on gut and other knowledges in religions of the African diaspora.
In particular, we will address the practices of embodied knowledge production and transmission in such Afro-diasporic religions such as Cuban Lucumí, Haitian Voodoo and Brazilian Candomblé. We will discuss some insights from her first book on sacred food preparation with current scholarship and gut feelings, knowing and beings in Black Atlantic traditions.
Distinguishing between intellectual comprehension and the types of understanding that practitioners derive from ritual experience, Dr. Pérez explains that the connection between the belly and the brain have only begun to be explored in Black Atlantic traditions. So thank you, Elizabeth, for being here today, and welcome to HDS.
I am a fan of your work, as you know. And so are my students with whom I read your book in the past, Religion in the Kitchen. So thank you, thank you for being here.
ELIZABETH PEREZ: Thank you. And I'm so grateful to you and to Charlie Stang and everyone else at the Center for the Study of World Religions for inviting me. It's an honor and a privilege.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Thank you, thank you so much for being here. So let's start from the book, Religion in the Kitchen. So do you want to tell us and to our audience, what's the book about? And how did you begin to work with food and the senses?
ELIZABETH PEREZ: Yeah. So, the book is-- well, why don't I just show you some pictures? That's always my default, whether I'm lecturing online, in a class, is to just show some images. So to sort of describe Black Atlantic religions for those of us who are not too familiar with them, they are traditions that crystallized during the transatlantic slave trade.
And so you can see the arrows moving from West and Central Africa to the Caribbean, to Latin America. And all of the different ethnic groups that you can't quite read on this map because it is a Zoom meeting, but the way that these traditions formed has altogether to do with the ethnic origins of the different cultural groups that were enslaved and brought to the Americas during this time period, roughly from 1500 to 1870. We can say maybe 1860.
In some of my classes-- and of course, you might read online-- that these traditions are called syncretic, meaning that they bring together different traditions. Normally, the default understanding is that they're a combination of Christianity and some West or Central African form of beliefs and practices.
Maybe a more generative way to think about that syncretism is that enslaved peoples were actually taking from different African ethnic groups and synthesizing their beliefs and practices to create new and really generative forms of worship. And so, there's a nice color coding in this map where you can see generally speaking, some of the sort of source groups and areas for these traditions and then how they played out in the Caribbean and Latin America.
And there are so many. I'll just flash quickly to also thinking about traditions like Hoodoo and Conjure that aren't normally classified as Afro-diasporic religions, but that I would argue-- and someone like Iman [INAUDIBLE] might argue as well-- it should really be classed in with Lucumí, Candomblé, and Vodou.
So the book, Religion in the Kitchen, cooking, talking and the making of these traditions, I did not start out wanting to study food preparation for my project. I found myself in the incredibly fortunate position of being able to first study what was really dominant in the literature before I started my dissertation research. So drumming rituals, divination, possession, thinking about the different ways that practitioners have expressed their beliefs and practices over-- well, the amount of time that we have this scholarship for, which is about the past century.
But within that, there was really no place that was given to food preparation. And I mentioned speaking with you a couple of days ago that food is often mentioned in the documents about these traditions. But there's the passive voice that's used, that food was made, it was placed on the table. And so my question was, well, who is doing the making of the food? And what does the food do? What does the food itself do?
And so this is a beautiful image of a table that's been set in the Dominican tradition of 21 Divisions, sometimes called Vudú, in the Dominican Republic. And it evokes some of the varieties, some of the vitality of what food is and does in these traditions. And I was also thinking about the fact that appetite has really not been elaborated as a really vital and reliable source for knowledge in the Western intellectual tradition.
Thanks to these gentlemen here-- I've got Thomas Aquinas, Emmanuel Kant, David Hume and Hegel, whose writings may be familiar to the audience-- associate appetite very much with the nether regions, judging for the most part that the appetite is kind of primal or a more primitive aspect of human experience, and that an encounter with food or an encounter with taste, it doesn't really allow for a kind of objective judgment about morality or aesthetics because it is so subjective.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: I'm very happy, if I can jump in, that you're mentioning this, because I'm teaching a course this semester in religion, materiality and the senses. And with my students, we've been addressing this, this hierarchy of the senses that we are used to think as natural. So thank you for mentioning that. They will be very happy, my students.
ELIZABETH PEREZ: Absolutely. And that's why food was not at the forefront of my mind. I was incredibly fortunate to find a open door at the home of the folks whose images I'm showing here, [? Ashabi ?] Mosley and [? Tundé ?] Mosley-- that's what I call them my book-- on the South Side of Chicago. And I thought that I might be doing work on some of those things that I mentioned, on music, on prayers, on divination.
But indeed, it only took one or two visits to realize how central a role food plays. And so this is an altar, it's a sort of a double altar. I have the image in my book of two people who had been initiated together. This is the one year anniversary of their initiation. And you can see a lot of fruit at the base of this altar, but what you don't see as clearly is all the cooked food-- the puddings, the candies that have been made, homemade from scratch for the deities called orishas.
And so my book has really centrally to do with these orishas, these deities. But what I'm arguing for, which was a bit unfashionable, and I haven't been called out as often as I thought I would be for adopting a kind of broadly comparative approach, and saying that, well, actually if we look at the lwa in Haitian Vodou or we look at the orishas in Candomblé, we see a very similar relationship-- not just that food plays an analogous, almost identical role, but that it also has the same role in shaping personhood and ideas about the body-- and as we'll go on to talk about, knowing.
And so the orishas all have their favorite foods. Their personalities are shaped around their literal tastes, what they want to see, what they want to smell. And then, sort of that idea of sight and smell kind of cohere with this understanding that they do taste, they do consume, in a sense-- that they have senses, in a way, in the same way that we do.
And the simile of them having senses like we do is really not a metaphor. It becomes a reality, especially when people get possessed. And when people mount the orishas, they quite literally then will be eating the food that has been put out for them. But there's an incredibly painstaking process leading up to that point where there is a classification of different objects and substances-- for example, here, different sacrificial animals that have had to be prepared, that have had to be cleaned, that have had to be cooked in specific ways.
These foods, actually-- this is a photograph that doesn't appear in my book, in part, because of the questions that it could raise that I can't really address. But you can see the way that the foods had been separated. It's actually for human consumption. People would be approaching this food after an initiation at a kind of banquet that's been laid out for the community to sort of, in some ways, in what's called the middle day of an initiation, to celebrate the ordination of a priest in the Lucumí tradition.
So I write a lot, as you know, about plucking, haptics, tactility. I was interested in getting into those areas once I realized what my project was about, thinking about the senses that don't as often get highlighted. And this illustration shows the butchering process. Again, this is a marvelous image by Tammy Jo Urban that shows where the birds, at least, will be cut in order to be butchered properly.
And so I move in the book from sort of a discussion of taxonomy and classification, kind of tacking back and forth between intellectual labor and manual labor. And so I think that kind of covers the first part. And then the talking part of the book focuses on speech genres and the way that elders relate information and they share their knowledge about who the orishas are, how they work in the world, what is their relationship to human beings.
And so often, this happens in the spaces of food preparation. I also describe a bit how it's a queer space, in a sense. Because it's not only been cisgender women who have been at the helm in the kitchen, but a very many generations of gay men who have also been the ones who have been the chefs, who have been calling the shots in the kitchen as to how things are going to look and taste and who's doing what. And so I wanted to put a spotlight on them because they aren't really acknowledged as being that important.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: No, that's fantastic. And one of the great contributions of your book I think-- and you were involved, during your fieldwork, in the preparation, right? You were [INAUDIBLE] in the kitchen, right? Do you want to share some anecdotes, maybe, of your being there?
ELIZABETH PEREZ: Indeed. And so I was in a position to be helping, to be assisting. And again, it's with enormous gratitude that I think about the way that I was invited into the community. Some people have asked why. In part, it may be my parents are Cuban. And so sort of coming from at least a working knowledge of experientially, the sort of way that Cuban religious traditions work.
Even though nobody in my family was directly initiated, my family is very much involved with Espiritismo in the southeastern part of the island. But nevertheless, maybe that's one of the reasons why I was able to participate at first. Since that fieldwork though, I did go on to be initiated in 2016. And so now, honestly, I do the same work. I'm still in a position of learning, of trying to follow what the elders are asking.
And this is a very rich space for me. And so I return as often as I can, now having two smaller children. I was recently-- let's see, last summer-- I attended and was able to assist in an initiation that was the first post-COVID initiation for me. And that was a really intense experience. Because you can see in these pictures, nobody's masked. People are not social distancing. You're rubbing against people.
Because even when there are houses with a lot of space, the kind, the nature of the work, it really demands proximity to other people. And it's a collective effort to make a saint or to crown someone, which is to say, to initiate someone. And so that first initiation after-- everyone had been vaccinated, but still, we were still barely out of lockdowns-- it made me much more aware of the air around me, of the odors, specifically of that undertaking, and how difficult discomfort makes it to perform the kind of cognitive operations that are being asked of you.
And so this is a couple of paragraphs from the book where I'm quoting Charles Malamoud, "What does it mean to begin?" He's talking about sacrifice and what sacrifice teaches. "What is the relationship between parts and wholes? What does it mean to measure?" And Oshunleye, who was one of my interlocutors and my elders asked in the kitchen, "How can you separate the part from the whole, and still have it be the whole?"
And so these are the kinds of philosophical discussions that people are having as they try to balance their own responses, their own bodily sensations and then knowing what the situation has to exact from them in order for something to be done properly, in order for this food to be "moral matter," as I describe it here.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: That's fantastic. And it's very interesting, your experience post-COVID. And I was wondering, maybe this is a question that a little bit weird, but did the orishas have opinions on masking? So was someone possessed and received some sort of indications of that, the changes of situations?
ELIZABETH PEREZ: That, I have not seen in my encounters over maybe the last year and a half. And when I say post-COVID, I, by no means, want to suggest that its post, as in the sense of after. It's sort of post as in we're still in the soup, as it were. But there has been every effort, as far as I know, in communities of Afro-diasporic practice to observe masking guidelines.
However, it can be very tricky, specifically because let's say, just taking this tradition, the kind of primordial, vital energy, called ase, that flows through the universe, that is activated by herbs, that is activated by song, that is activated by work, by labor, it also flows through the breath. It's in one of its most concentrated forms in the breath and in speech.
And you can think of breath as also including saliva. And we've all seen those animations of the way that when you speak, those molecules are projected into the air. And so there are ritual moments in which it's not optimal to be masked. So it is a very tricky set of issues. And people did get initiated and have been getting initiated all through this pandemic. But-- many of whom, initiated for health. I mean, that's always the case. But a lot of communities tried to restrict what they were doing to just the bare minimum.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: One of the things I find fascinating about how you describe being called in your book, is that you don't really have many options once you are called, right? So orishas call you, and then you find yourself-- right?
ELIZABETH PEREZ: Well, what I'm trying to think about-- and I guess that ties in a little bit with sort of the subject matter for today-- is that there is what I call an ethno symptomatology that is involved in acquiring the interpretive frameworks that conduce to subjectification, that make you a religious subject. And what that means, the ethno symptomatology piece, is about coming to understand your body as a medium, as media for the spirits to communicate with you.
And so people coming into the tradition who are kind of in a state of ignorance about who are these deities and what am I doing here and what are they associated with-- they don't realize that. But it's really part of the subjectivation process. When people say, oh, I have a headache. It must be Obatala. Or, I keep stubbing my toe, and feet, being associated-- least in this tradition-- with Elegua.
Well, it's that Elegua wants something from me-- or my stomach, associated with Oshun. And so there is a really indispensable role that the body plays in learning about the orishas. Because it's when people start to see their bodies as being subject to the dominion and to the governance and ownership of the spirits that they can say, oh, I've been called. I have a calling, I have a vocation that cannot be denied.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: That's fantastic. And I think it's a good transition to your actually current research. Because you seem to have transitioning from your first book to gut knowledge and to maybe a more prominent role of the body-- also, not only of human bodies in knowledge. Do you want to tell us a bit more about that?
ELIZABETH PEREZ: Yeah, absolutely. I was trying to remember when I started writing about gut feelings. And I think it was as the result of being invited for the 2018 American Anthropological Association meeting for a panel on social death and a vital relations, and thinking about theories of social death and what role kinship has played in the African diaspora, in particular, in religions.
And so I knew that I wanted to write about the feelings in the gut that come up in the kitchen that I sort of wrote up a little bit. As you're working, you feel maybe nauseous or you're hungry. And the nausea is kind of battling the hunger until you can get to a point where you can go somewhere to eat.
But then also, I was thinking about the number of times that the stomach and the intestines are mentioned in divination verses, which was really something that I only realized after I myself was initiated, reflecting on divination verses that had come up for me and wondering why have those not been theorized to a greater extent. And so I wrote a piece kind of tying gut feelings and reactions to feelings of kinship, and especially that automatic sense of accountability that one has for members of religious communities as families.
Because once people become initiated, they do-- normatively-- begin to regard the people in that community as siblings or as mother and father figures. And I started to think about the role that the gut has in creating that sense of bonding and affinity to the extent that you would go to the ends of the earth for those people if they asked you to. You would get on a plane and fly halfway around the country if they needed you.
What is that about? How does that happen? It can't be purely cognitive, right? And so from gut feelings, I started thinking about the beings that are associated with the stomach and intestines, and just really the whole gastrointestinal tract in Afro-diasporic religions. Often, it's trickster spirits who have sort of control of the stomach. But very often, there's not a hard and fast distinction between those interoceptive sensations that we have.
And they're not easily localizable. It's hard to say, are you having menstrual cramps or are you having stomach cramps, right? It's a zone of opacity where it's hard to know. And that's precisely why they come up so often in divination verses, is that people go to diviners because they're having-- they can't put their finger on what's wrong, they can't describe.
And this is a challenge to with medical doctors is that the number of things that could be wrong with you is vast. And if you can articulate what those things are, where to pinpoint the pain, you're facing a problem. And so from gut feelings, there was sort of a train of thought then, gut beings, thinking about the way also that Lucumí, in particular, locates its origins in the ancestors bringing some of their ritual sacra to Cuba in their stomachs.
There are stories where literally, No Remigio Herrera Adeshina, one of the first babalawos in Cuba, he brought his divination tools to Cuba in his stomach, that other founding figures brought consecrated stones to Cuba. And so how do we make sense of these stories? And so that was sort of the genesis for a short book that I'm working on for Cambridge University Press about the gut and tying all of these different themes to knowledge and knowing.
And these really common sense, almost ubiquitous messages that we get about trusting your gut or following your gut, knowing your gut, et cetera, et cetera-- these are all over social media. Memes about knowing yourself, trusting your intuition-- but what does that really mean?
And so in the end, I'm also trying to figure out how much of what I'm talking about involves speech genres and conventional ways of talking about emotion and appeal to something beyond reason by pointing to the gut, and how much is what I'm talking about really to do with actual sensations that people are feeling that they might not be able to verbalize?
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: That's fantastic. But indeed, following what you just said, there's a subjectification that happens through learning how to do differently engage with one's own body. And so out of this, I have a couple of questions. One is more general. What do your informants think-- interlocutors, let's say-- think about what counts as knowledge?
And maybe for you also, as an anthropologist studying in this kind of things, what counts as knowledge? And also-- that's kind of personal, though. You can decide not to answer it if you don't want. Did your research change the way you engage, learn to engage with your body and with food, personally?
ELIZABETH PEREZ: Knowledge. So for many-- I won't say all of my interlocutors because we're getting into a very difficult area, right? Because as an ethnographer, you can only really know what people tell you and what you can observe firsthand. But there are different realms in which knowledge becomes a salient concept.
One of these realms was addressed by Diana DiSpirito Santo, who I believe spoke with you about Espiritismo. And so I've worked with this community that practices Espiritismo since the Genesis of my research. It is not that prominent in the book. But I have written about the way that knowledge in the spaces of Spiritis ritual, for example, that knowledge is constructed collaboratively.
That knowledge is not something that is the individual property of one of the participants, but that people come to an understanding of a sensation, a piece of information, of a vision, maybe, that somebody is having in their minds, that it is actually knowledge. And in those spaces, as others have written, knowledge is kind of considered to be a substance, in a sense, and a substance that has transformative effects, that once one has that knowledge, that it can actually create other sorts of effects. It's not merely a truth claim.
Now, on the other hand, if we're thinking about, for example, traditions like Haitian Vodou, the concept of connaissance or knowledge in Lucumí, it's very different from in the Western intellectual tradition what we see as knowledge, which is novelty. For us to be knowledge producers in the corporate university, that means they're coming up with new ideas, you're coming up with new pathways.
In Afro-diasporic religions, knowledge is about ancestrality. It's about connecting with the past. It's about knowing how to do things in the appropriate way, not necessarily knowing particular things. It's not propositional knowledge. And this is an important point because these are not-- I mentioned quote unquote "beliefs and practices" earlier. But these really are not traditions that have creeds.
They don't have lists of belief. Sometimes, people believe really quite-- even within the same community-- very heterogeneous things. But they know how to do, and that's really what's prized. And so creating the type of body and providing the sort of corporeal experience is really necessary to be able to pass on knowledge to future generations.
And so the sense of knowledge, too, you can kind of get a sense of what that means by thinking about how elders are referred to, especially elders who have passed on. In Spanish, they're referred to as ciencias, that they are sciences. So people will sometimes mourn the death of someone by saying, [SPEAKING SPANISH], you've lost a science that was in the world.
And I don't want to get on a tangent about Shastric knowledge or other understandings of knowledge that are much more book based. But I think you can understand that in these communities, there's a combination of embodied knowledge, intellectual labor and comprehension, plus a lot of memorization that can be rote. Also, muscle memory is really important to thinking about what are the different aspects of knowledge.
And divination verses are also full of musings about knowledge, about limitations to knowledge. Sometimes Shango will say, "don't use the term 'I know' or the phrase, 'I know', because that will limit you intellectually. Just do not say that." It's said that nobody can know Oshun, the orisha Oshun. So there's a way that there's a kind of reinforcement of being able to define knowledge, of being able to say that you grasp something. Because that means that you have stopped striving to know more.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: That's fantastic. And I think there's a lesson to learn for us anthropologists and scholars here around what we can serve as knowledge for us today.
ELIZABETH PEREZ: There is. And you did ask about for me, as a ethnographer, what is knowledge? And honestly, I feel that it has to do really with data, with data collection and making an argument. So for me, as someone who's trying to make arguments in my work, I'm thinking about questions of evidentiality, of what can count as evidence, of what will be persuasive to my audience. I'm always thinking about rhetoric and rhetorical forms.
And it's not maybe a satisfying answer to those of us who think that knowledge-- that there is an ultimate knowledge that is objective, that is neutral. I just don't buy into those notions. And absolutely, being in this kind of milieu has shaped me and how I think about what human beings are capable of, what I myself am capable of doing, and trying to not confuse being able to verbally articulate something with having a kind of gut knowledge because those are very two different things.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: I think that this point about language is a very important one. We tend to associate knowledge with what is linguistically describable. And the ineffable sounds a little bit weird to us. But it's indeed a place of knowledge. And so I think this reminder, it's a very important one for us. Did it change somehow, after your initiation, the way you approach your own experience as a form of knowledge for your research?
ELIZABETH PEREZ: Yes, yes. And how I would love to tell you, to be able to open that up a little bit more. I guess it increased my sense of responsibility and accountability to a particular-- not just the university or the academic community, but kind of relocating my primary responsibility, in some ways, being to my elders and the community of my initiation.
And in some ways, there's-- in the book, I make it very clear. This is not being written by an initiated person. I have no authority. So take or leave. If my arguments are convincing to you, that's fantastic. If not, there are a lot of other, really wonderful books to read. And so at this point, I feel in a way that I would like to build from a slightly different standpoint.
But again, I'm still not in a position of authority. I still really am not calling the shots in any way, shape or form. And I don't even think that's a humbling thing. I think that it's very special and a privileged position to be in, to be able to learn from the people and the spaces that give me access.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: No, that's fantastic. And as a scholar who, as well, decided to join at least some of the practices that I encountered in my [INAUDIBLE] work after my fieldwork, I do feel this dimension of the responsibility that comes with your positionality of having been granted such important access to life words and experiences and lives of my interlocutors. So I think it's very important to remind everybody that inhabiting those spaces as an [INAUDIBLE] is always a gift that we've been given. So yeah. I just wanted to add this.
ELIZABETH PEREZ: It is, it is. And now that you mention positionality, I think it also ties into the data collection piece, it in the sense that one's gender and sexual identity, one's racial and ethnic identity, your class position, it gives you affordances, it gives you entree into certain kinds of spaces and understandings, and it also limits.
And I think it behooves us to understand that the author or the narrator may be reliable, and yet be missing a lot because of the spaces they're in. And so it's a challenge, always, to keep that at the forefront-- and to keep reminding the reader who may be kind of swept along as you're telling the story and may be forgetting that you're fallible.
And that if it were an African-American person doing this research, it would be different. If a were a Chinese-American person or a Chinese-Cuban person, that would be necessarily a different story and a different data set that you would come up with. Also to mention, in terms of knowledge, positionality is important, in the sense that the knower in these traditions is not a unitary individual.
And so we can think about, well, how does knowledge change if we're not sure what self is the self that knows any given things? Because in these traditions, the self is multiple. It's not individual, but what McKim Marriott calls dividual. That we're talking about porous selves that have other spirits, whether they're spirit guides, orishas, lwa, ancestors, that, at any point, can become dominant in a person's everyday communication with someone else or being in the world.
And so one of those selves can know something that is not available to those other selves. And again, paramount is the experience of possession, where the self is completely displaced by that of a spirit or an ancestor. So that also throws some complications into the mix.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Absolutely. And that's another very important remark that I would argue it's also my experience in ethnography with magic practitioners-- although, of course, in Southern Italy or in Europe. But that's for another conversation. So I have some final questions. These are more geared toward my students, who, as I said, are taking this course in religion, materiality and the senses.
And so I would like to ask you some questions as a ethnographer who is interested in the anthropology of the senses-- in sensory ethnography, in many ways, because you have been in the kitchen for much of your fieldwork. So what do you think is the role of the senses in anthropological knowledge?
ELIZABETH PEREZ: Right, the role of the senses. I mean, it's a good question, because in a way, you could turn it around. Like, what is the opposite of the senses, right? Would that be the brain? The senses-- I mean, obviously means of data collection, that we have available to us a different interfaces, a surfaces that can be impressed so as to gain knowledge of the world or certain kinds of feelings and emotions about the world.
Now whether we operationalize those emotions and those feelings is another question. It depends on what kind of argument we want to make. But I think that we have to recognize what you mentioned before, the sensory hierarchy. That for example, our culture is very much based on the visual, that there is a kind of primacy of the visual, not only in our culture, but in many cultures throughout history.
Like, seeing becomes a kind of-- it's at the pinnacle of the senses. And historically, there are all kinds of rationales. If we look at Buddhist texts or Hindu texts, they tell us different things about why-- or in Jain texts, why it is. And one of the rationales can be that because vision, it is so powerful. We can see things at a far distance, but we can't smell things from a far distance. Maybe that's the reason why visuality is sort of the prime sense.
But nevertheless, these kind of other, less emphasized senses-- not just taste, but haptics, tactility, again, interoceptive sensation, prior receptivity, our movement through the world, how does our body know how far something is or how we can move through space? These are all senses that are really worth elaborating.
And I think maybe the role of the senses, then, in field work, is to guide us maybe toward, in the most ideal way of thinking about it, towards what our passion might be, what we could be really captivated by or enthralled by in our research. I mean, ultimately, the senses should give us some joy.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Yes, that's a very interesting take. And also I have-- if I can mention, you briefly mentioned how sight and smell, for example, in your fieldwork, work together. And so also, this space of what we think about discrete senses interact and build something new, or let us engage with what is in front of us in different ways. I think it's something that stems out of your book in a very clear way.
ELIZABETH PEREZ: I will, however, give Loic Waquant his due. I read Body and Soul, Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer when I was in grad school. And it had a huge effect on me. So thinking about for senses, you could substitute habitus, and this understanding of how can our habitus be transformed to become a tool for research.
Ruth Behar's work in anthropology as well, Yvonne Daniel, who is a scholar of dance-- these are more proximate scholars who I think really taught me to see or taught me to smell and hear and feel in a scholarly way. So there is a sense for me that the senses are indispensable. But we want to be able to figure out how do we harness the most powerful combination of them for our work.
And there is this kind of metaphor of synesthesia, that idea of different senses coming together that I think will Waquant, Behar, Paul Stoller, works with wonderfully well in their work. And it makes for what Stiller has called "sensuous ethnography," which is a goal that the more you think about the intersensory, if you prefer, as David Howes would prefer, that it makes not just for better research, but better narrative, as much as we can capture what our senses tell us in our work.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Absolutely. Then what would be your recommendation for students interested in embarking on this journey of research and engaging with the senses ethnographically?
ELIZABETH PEREZ: Oh, sort of advice about how to take flight on this path? That's a great question. I mean, reading some poetry would be a good idea. Read the poetry of Martin Espada and poets who are really engaged with the senses. Because they are going to be the poets who might sort of spark understandings of the importance of certain situations, certain combinations of feelings, as well as scholarly work.
And I think this is the importance for me of the humanities alongside the social sciences. Because it can't just be that we're reading or we're engaging with scholarly ideas and people. We have to somehow attend to what are the artworks that provoke something in us? What is the writing that really brings us to life, that gives us a feeling of being alive? And if we've kind of been attentive, observant participants in our own lives, I think that will make us better scholars.
I don't have that many novel recommendations in terms of who to read. You can't do better than Zora Neale Hurston and Katherine Dunham, in some ways, for just foundational work that focus as a laser, in some ways, on the senses-- and in fact, was not appreciated in its time, precisely because it was so suffused with sensory information that was not considered knowledge of an intellectual kind. It was not sufficiently objective or neutral. Ruth Landis's work for example, was denigrated for the same reason.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: That's fantastic. I thank you so much for these indications. I think that my students will very much benefit from them. I want to ask a question from our audience today. And then, I have a final one about your current and future research.
So Olga [INAUDIBLE] asks, the idea of the banquet exists in almost all traditions across cultures and eras. So does the concept of fasting, which usually precedes the banquet. Can you please comment on these two, banquet and fast, within the context of the religions of the African diaspora? Thanks.
ELIZABETH PEREZ: Yeah, so one of the books that was so-- well, the work that was influential to me as a college student-- was Carolyn Walker Bynum's work and Holy Feast, Holy Fast. And maybe it was among the first work that I read that was both scholarly and historical, focused on gender and sexuality, and also so rich with description.
And so we can think about the way that food in a banquet is a symbol of plenitude, of abundance, of the cornucopia, in some ways, standing for plenty, in a very general sense. And that tracks through many different kinds of religious texts or documentary texts, if we want to look at those texts, as well.
We always want to think about power, though. We want to think about gift exchange. For whom is the banquet being given? Whose tastes are being privileged, right? No banquet is going to have everything and every banquet is going to be pitched to the taste of kind of a particular, imagined palate. And I think that's where we can start kind of unpacking and thinking about power relations in these kinds of scenarios.
That's quite obvious, actually, with fasting, is that there is an imperative to with to withhold sustenance for a particular purpose. And often, if we unpick those, those purposes are going to be quite ideological, whether they result in the creation of kind of idealized body in more secular kind of spaces. Or if you think about the way that, before initiation rituals, before the banquet that I was talking about on the middle day, you also have quite a bit of fasting going on by the person who's being initiated.
Even, you can think about when people are working in the kitchen. They are kind of having to fast a lot of the time. And they're encouraged to eat, it's not the kind of fasting where there's an active withholding of food. Folks are always saying, go eat something, go eat something. Eat something now, because later you won't be able to, kind of a thing. But there is an ideology at play there.
And so there are so many ideas that come to mind, and I'll just throw in one last thing, is we want to think about the way Robertson Smith, in his Lectures on the Religion of the Semites kind of opened up the communal meal in a very early moment in the history of religions as kind of the ur ritual-- thinking especially about the Roman Catholic Eucharist. And so this kind of Eucharistic banquet, this Eucharistic meal is at the basis of so many of our understandings of religion.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: That's very true. Thank you for this answer. My last question, so what are you currently working on beyond the work you mentioned on gut knowledge? Yes, what's in your pipeline?
ELIZABETH PEREZ: Right, what is in the pipeline? So I am hoping that The Gut, a Black Atlantic Alimentary Tract will see publication at some point this year or the next couple of years. I am also, my next project sort of centrally involves Black and Latinx transgender religious practitioners. And I was fortunate enough to receive an NEH summer stipend this summer to kind of move that project a little bit further along-- although I'm still doing a couple of interviews.
And hopefully that will be the full length next monograph. And I would ask people to look out for, there's going to be a piece in the Immanent Frame online that kind of, in some ways, recapitulates the article about Azealia Banks that you mentioned, Harlem-born rapper and provocateuse, Azealia Banks, and thinking about who can be a philosopher, who can claim to be doing philosophy? And what kinds of predecessors we can think of Azealia Banks as having in her metaphysical speculations.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: That's fascinating and important work. So I'm looking forward to be able to reading it. And I think it's time to wrap up now. So I thank you very much, Elizabeth, for your participation and wonderful conversation. I will stay here for 3 hours talking with you, to be honest. But we have some time constraints.
So thank you very much for having been with us. And please stay tuned on the activities of the CSWR, the Transcendence and Transformation Initiative of Gnosiologies. You all can find all this information on this CSWR website, including the registration link for our next number gnosiologies event. That will be a month from now, on March 23rd.
I will have a conversation with anthropologist Jack Hunter on para-anthropology, the anthropology of the paranormal. So thank you all for being with us, and have a great rest of your day. Thank you so, so much and see you soon.
ELIZABETH PEREZ: Thank you.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Bye bye.
ELIZABETH PEREZ: [INAUDIBLE]
SPEAKER 2: Sponsor, Center for the Study of World Religions.
SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2022, the President and Fellows of Harvard College.