Introduction
Tom Boylston
Chapter from the book: Boylston, T. 2018. The Stranger at the Feast: Prohibition and Mediation in an Ethiopian Orthodox Christian Community.
Part of
Chapter from the book: Boylston, T. 2018. The Stranger at the Feast: Prohibition and Mediation in an Ethiopian Orthodox Christian Community.
The Zege coffee forest exists because of a prohibition on plowing maintained by the local monasteries. Starting from this point, this introduction shows how a logic of prohibitions pervades religious practice in Zege. Where other studies of Christianity point to textuality and ideologies of sincerity, here the overarching structure of prohibition and fasting, which I call the ritual regime, is the starting point of religious practice. These prohibitions are shown to shape the landscape itself and to supply the logic of saintly mediation that Orthodox Christians in Zege identify as the core of their religious lives.
Boylston, T. 2018. Introduction. In: Boylston, T, The Stranger at the Feast. California: University of California Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.44.a
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Published on Jan. 12, 2018