Panel: RELIGION AS "SITUATED KNOWLEDGE" IN SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION



392.3 - ENTANGLED TASTES: HOW HEALTH AND HALAL DISCOURSES SHAPE EATING PRACTICES IN BERLIN'S ISLAMIC KINDERGARTENS

AUTHORS:
Stenske L. (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin ~ Berlin ~ Germany)
Text:
In my contribution, I analyze the entanglement of health and halal discourse solidified in food-related affordances in Islamic kindergartens in Berlin. Everywhere children eat, they learn how to eat. Learning in this context is framed as the incorporation of implicit, practical knowledge (Reckwitz 2003). This includes the material dimension involved in eating—the artifacts, the other participants, and, of course, the food itself (Alkemeyer and Buschmann 2017). Within this process, the children learn to relate in a certain way to the material dimension. They do so by adopting certain schemes of perception and classification (Bourdieu 1979). In these schemes, discourses of different extents demonstrate their power by enforcing and reproducing certain eating practices. Based on my fieldwork in Berlin kindergartens, I reconstruct the meaning of the material dimension in its local setting and uncover its possible social, cultural, and religious components (Schäfer and Daniel 2015). I do so, by applying an analysis of food-related affordances (Gibson 1979) to uncover the schemes of perception and classification conveyed in the eating practices. In this way, eating practices in Islamic kindergartens in Berlin are analyzed as situated knowledge (Haraway 1988). By extending a practice-theoretical framework to discourse analysis (Becker 2021), I am able to retrace the entanglements between general health discourse and the specific halal discourse, which together may transform how the next generation eats. Religious knowledge is framed as a productive resource through its entanglement in the shape of good and righteous eating according to (an) Islamic tradition, in combination with elements of the health discourse from an institutional perspective. By untangling the halal and health discourses solidified in the material dimension of eating practices in Islamic kindergartens, religious knowledge becomes apparent as a resource for social transformation.