Food for the body and soul: Veganism, righteous male bodies, and culinary redemption in the Kingdom of Yah

Abstract

This article grapples with the unlikely combination of veganism, righteous black bodies, and servitude as expressed in the “divine holistic culture” of the African Hebrew Israelite Community (AHIC). Based on our ethnography of how the Community re-scripts strong, virile black male bodies from rough brutes to responsible and righteous patriarchs, we show how the Hebrew Israelites’ vegan diet undergirds their Biblically based culture and fuels their salvation project. We propose the term “culinary redemption” to encapsulate the dramatic shift made by the AHIC from a theology based on salvation in the afterlife to a restorative cosmology in the here and now, and suggest that the food and foodways of other subaltern groups also provide powerful material for initiating social justice movements and religious change.

Maasai on the phone: materiality, tourism, and the extraordinary in Zanzibar

“…Throughout his stay in Tanzania he met Maasai men, and what was first an excited and naïve gaze over these "noble savages", gradually became complex and intriguing. Engaged at the time in an ethnographic research of the African Hebrew Israelite Community in Israel, and co-writing an article on their "Black Male Bodies" (Markowitz and Avieli, 2020), he realized that the ideas developed for the research of African American men in Israel were relevant in some ways to the Maasai in Zanzibar. He, therefore, started taking notes, turning from observations and conversations into fieldnotes and open-ended interviews with Maasai men, other Tanzanians, and tourists.…”