Food Culture, Religious Belief and Community Relations: An Ethnographic Study of the Overseas Chinese Catholic

Abstract

Religion and food culture are two closely related topics in the Christian discourse and have been the subject of extensive anthropological research. This paper takes the Boston Chinese Catholics as a case study, and it adopts an ethnographic research methodology to explore the ways in which the sense of belonging develops in the Church community, based on the analysis of food culture in this context. Chinese Catholics in Boston are mainly Fujian and Hong Kong immigrants, and the class, status, and economic differences between these two communities are well apparent. The Boston Chinese Catholic Church divides food into sacred and secular. During religious rituals, all Catholics share the sacred food, the Holy Body and the Holy Blood, which symbolize the unity of the Catholic Church. In everyday life, Fujian Catholic and Hong Kong Catholic community members follow the dietary habits of their community to maintain a division between each community’s traditions. Over the years, the Boston Chinese Catholic Church has developed a flexible strategy—externally consistent and internally differentiated—to maintain the unity of the Church while embracing the cultural differences of its members. This flexible strategy has also influenced the way in which the Boston Chinese Catholic Church operates. This study indicates that we need to place more emphasis on the diversity and complexity of the members of the overseas Chinese Catholic Church and the specificities of the Catholic religion’s discourse so that we can better understand the overall practices and methods of overseas Chinese Catholicism. This study is a catalyst for the study of overseas Chinese Catholicism, as well as the study of food culture, religion, community, and identity in that context.