Islamic religion and food practices in migration context: negotiating belonging and performing subjectivities

My paper focuses on the ethnographic material collected during a doctoral research around the culinary practices of Moroccan women living in the city of Sesto San Giovanni (in Milan hinterland, Italy). In particular, adopting a praxeological approach to subjectivation (Warnier 2001), I will highlight those aspects of the materiality that I studied which recall the belonging of the considered women to Islamic religion. In fact, everyday food consumption (or that related to specific events) and the very same preparation of recipes, are influenced not only by the prescriptions concerning licit and illicit food, but also by the suggestions regarding food which are appropriate to eat.
On the one hand, Islamic norms prohibit some food to believers, such as certain meats because of the animal species or the category of victims (Benkheira 1997) to which they belong. Nevertheless, Muslim women behaviours concerning meat consumption are various, such as those of my informants, who in some cases demonstrate to negotiate such norms in order to materially shape a specific self interacting with different collective belongings. On the other hand, some Quranic verses and some sayings of the prophet Muhammad, define a soul food (Rouse and Hoskin 2004), by suggesting to believers what to eat to perform their piety: the preparation and the consumption of some food – and not only the abstention from it – finds in fact religious reasons. In order to follow such suggestions, in a context where Islamic religion is not the majority one, women has to deal with local rules while performing the materiality of some rituals.
Religion and traditions intertwine and they shape specific knowledge and savoir-faire which are negotiated by the women considered so as to affirm their various belongings and to face the constraints which the new lived context imposes to them. Such constraints oblige a form of reflexivity on religious norms and rites (Højbjerg 2002), in order to define a limit beyond which modifications are perceived as subtractions of sense (Dore 2001). In my paper, I will try to give some ethnographic examples of these forms of reflexivity and to show how these dynamics constitute the materiality upon which and with which the women considered define their subjectivity. To support my reflexions, I will use visual materials such as photos and videos, which will witness the material density of these facts.