No. LV (2024)
Articles

You are what you don’t eat – Fasting, Ethics, and Ethnography, in Serbia and Beyond

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  • Nicholas Lackenby
Nicholas Lackenby
Department of Anthropology University College London London, United Kingdom
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2298/BALC2455263L

Published 26.12.2024

Keywords

  • ethics,
  • food,
  • fasting,
  • former Yugoslavia,
  • Orthodox Christianity,
  • Serbia
    • ...More
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How to Cite

Lackenby, N. (2024). You are what you don’t eat – Fasting, Ethics, and Ethnography, in Serbia and Beyond . Balcanica - Annual of the Institute for Balkan Studies, (LV), 263–274. https://doi.org/10.2298/BALC2455263L

Copyright (c) 2024 Balcanica - Annual of the Institute for Balkan Studies

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Abstract

This article examines Orthodox fasting in contemporary Serbia. It does so through the theoretical lens of ‘ethical affordances’, suggesting that food and fasting practices allow a range of people to articulate different ethical evaluations. Food and fasting generate diverse reflections on the importance of rules, spiritual growth, hypocrisy, and sincerity. Thinking anthropologically, we see that people with range of viewpoints on the Church are in fact united in making ethical evaluations. More broadly, the article speculates that thinking about the ethical affordances of food might be one way to develop the ethnography of religion after Yugoslav socialism more generally.

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