Of community and kołduny: Food, identity, inclusion, and exclusion among Polish Tatars

Polish Tatars are a minority Muslim community who have lived on the Eastern borderlands of Poland for over 600 years, forming an integral part of Poland despite distinct social and religious customs. I argue that food practices among Polish Tatars in the Podlasie region, rather than being merely a symbolic means of expressing difference, actively create community as forces of both exclusion and inclusion. Affective bonds are reinforced through the bringing together of individuals in the space of the kitchen to cook and consume Polish Tatar food during holidays, but fears of assimilation and loss of identity are reinforced by a perceived weakening of these practices among the youth. Food practices in restaurants represent the community as a type of familiar alterity that is both distinct from, and yet a part of, wider Polish society, while simultaneously mosques complicate binary conceptions of food as belonging exclusively to one group. The contested consumption of pork and alcohol connects Polish Tatars to the wider Polish population as "our Muslims," while also creating boundaries with non-Tatar Muslims. In this paper, food is understood as an agentic force that actively crafts group boundaries of belonging through processes of inclusion and exclusion.