“At ‘Amen Meals’ It’s Me and God” Religion and Gender: A New Jewish Women’s Ritual

New ritual practices performed by Jewish women can serve as test cases for an examination of the phenomenon of the creation of religious rituals by women. These food-related rituals, which have been termed ‘‘amen meals’’ were developed in Israel beginning in the year 2000 and subsequently spread to Jewish women in Europe and the United States. This study employs a qualitative-ethnographic methodology grounded in participant-observation and in-depth interviews to describe these nonobligatory, extra-halakhic rituals. What makes these rituals stand out is the women’s sense that through these rituals they experience a direct con- nection to God and, thus, can change reality, i.e., bring about jobs, marriages, children, health, and salvation for friends and loved ones. The ‘‘amen’’ rituals also create an open, inclusive woman’s space imbued with strong spiritual–emotional energies that counter the women’s religious marginality. Finally, the purposes and functions of these rituals, including identity building and displays of cultural capital, are considered within a theoretical framework that views ‘‘doing gender’’ and ‘‘doing religion’’ as an integrated experience

A História da Alimentação: balizas historiográficas

Os M. pretenderam traçar um quadro da História da Alimentação, não como um novo ramo epistemológico da disciplina, mas como um campo em desenvolvimento de práticas e atividades especializadas, incluindo pesquisa, formação, publicações, associações, encontros acadêmicos, etc. Um breve relato das condições em que tal campo se assentou faz-se preceder de um panorama dos estudos de alimentação e temas correia tos, em geral, segundo cinco abardagens Ia biológica, a econômica, a social, a cultural e a filosófica!, assim como da identificação das contribuições mais relevantes da Antropologia, Arqueologia, Sociologia e Geografia. A fim de comentar a multiforme e volumosa bibliografia histórica, foi ela organizada segundo critérios morfológicos. A seguir, alguns tópicos importantes mereceram tratamento à parte: a fome, o alimento e o domínio religioso, as descobertas européias e a difusão mundial de alimentos, gosto e gastronomia. O artigo se encerra com um rápido balanço crítico da historiografia brasileira sobre o tema

Bestial metamorphoses: Blake’s variations on trans-human change in Dante’s Hell

William Blake’s engagement with Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy (1824-7) illuminates the convergence of Classical and Christian iconography at the heart of Blake’s bestiary. Oswald Spengler coined the term ‘pseudomorphosis’ to ‘denote the unwilling conformity of a new and dynamic culture to the forms and formulas of an older culture’. Erwin Panofsky took up the concept to investigate divergences in form and content between text and image in the medieval translation of classical literature and visual culture. Against Spengler’s dramatic take on the fight towards form, and Panofsky’s recuperation of medium divergence in cultural translation, Theodor W. Adorno read pseudomorphosis as a medium’s imitation of another medium, an uncritical ‘stage in the process of convergence’. Drawing on the iconological school’s analysis of the pseudomorphic articulations of cultural transmission, I wish to explore Blake’s monsters as Christian reinventions of classical mythology. Dante’s emblematic bestiary reinvents monsters from classical literature in a series of transgressions of the boundaries of species. This essay will draw on the debated concept of pseudomorphosis to explore the dialectic tension between assimilation, parody, and disintegration of form in Blake’s reinvention of Dante’s visions of hell. Classical sculptures used as prototypes of the human ideal are subjected to a series of demonic inversions. Hybrid forms and transformations culminate in the reversible serpent metamorphoses that express the bestial condition of the thieves in Cantos XXIV and XXV of Inferno. The multiplication of images Blake devotes to this case of transhuman change indicates its key place in the interminglings between man and beast in his approach to the Commedia. This chapter explores Blake’s serpent sequence and the possibilities of metamorphosis as a way of interrogating alternative models of animal human encounter. The frame of punishment suggests that Dante’s bestial metamorphoses represent a series of transgressions of boundaries. However, Blake’s versions bring to light alternative possibilities in the handling of species, showing coexistence or overlaps, intermediate steps in a continuum, fusion through commingling. Metamorphosis itself changes with acts of translation – between languages, genres, and media