Avoidances and transgressions: agency, religiosity, and moralism in food and politics

Food avoidance is a negotiated and changeable compromise among religious prescriptions, social pressures, and personal predilections. Just as the formal rules reflect the structures of social and political authority, moreover, the culturally intimate space of personal practice may reflect contextual changes leading to sometimes agonized re-assessments of what is acceptable; it may also be a surer guide to insiderhood than the rules themselves. Studying food avoidances as a dynamic space of agency through reinterpretation and transgression may also illuminate the lability of political identities, on which concerns over the significance, appropriateness, and efficacy of boycotts – themselves often involving contestations over food – shed particularly revealing light.