‘Raising Sacrifice at Home’ and ‘The Sweet History of Fanid'
Wednesday 7 May 2025, 10am – 11am BST
Online, Registration Required
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Swan Hyeon Cho, ‘Raising Sacrifice at Home’
One summer in 2014 at Hatay, the Turkish coastal region bordering Syria, I met a kid (a baby goat) called Rambo at the house of Werda teyze (auntie), a proud daughter of an Alawite sheikh. The name ‘Rambo’ apparently comes from the Hollywood action movie. The family fed him with great care and entertained him with fun games. Rambo’s disappearance, however, and speaking of him have been taboo for a long time. One day, roughly a decade later, the teyze broke the silence and broached the destiny of dear Rambo. “May he go to heaven (mekanı cennet olsun)!” She had offered a vow to sacrifice a lamb upon the safe return of her two sons from their military service. Following the common belief, she believes the soul of Rambo is now resting in heaven.
Based on my ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in post-earthquake Hatay, I trace the complex dynamics between the human and the non-human in sacrifice practice. While buying the sacrifice is becoming common, especially in urban areas, raising sacrifices under the family’s roof is also widespread among villagers. Vow-givers say raising animals for sacrifice is a way to overcome financial impossibility. I explore how this practice allows people to connect with devotion and disconnect from commodification.
Su Hyeon Cho is a DPhil candidate at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. As a doctoral scholar at the Orient-Institut Istanbul (OIIST), she is currently conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Turkey. Her ethnographic fieldwork explores a ritual porridge called harisa among the Alawite, Greek Orthodox, and Armenian communities in the post-crisis landscape called Hatay, south of Turkey.
Amanda Geraldes, ‘The Sweet Heritage of Fanid: Savoir-Faire, Celebrations, and Cultural Identity’
The fanid is a type of confectionery, a pulled sugar, that has been widely used since the Middle Ages. Crossing spaces and times, fanid remains as a candy, serving as a devotional confection and used as a gift in celebrations of popular religiosity. This delicate confection is a food heritage of several communities that materialize devotion in sugar pieces. This seminar presents some connections of the ritualized uses of fanid in religious celebrations: the Feast of the Holy Spirit (Portugal and Brazil) and the Day of the Dead (Mexico). The ritual praxis of fanid builds, from the traditions of its uses and consumption, a food heritage in these locations. In moments of celebration, eating food also means consuming a memory, a tradition and an identity. The fanid constitutes a food heritage in these localities and the moments of celebration safeguard the savoir-faire: knowledges, techniques and gestures of making this artifact.
Amanda Geraldes has a PhD in History from the University of Évora (UÉ/Portugal) jointly with the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG/Brazil). Her doctoral thesis, titled "Uses, Consumption, and Symbolic Relations of Sugar: The Ibero-American Trajectory of Fanid (From the Middle Ages to Contemporary Times)", presents the historical development of meanings attributed to sugar and fanid over time. She is currently a researcher with the UNESCO Chair in Intangible Heritage and Traditional Know-How: Interconnecting Heritage (CIDEHUS/UÉ), with the project DIAITA-Food Heritage of Lusophony (University of Coimbra) and with the research groups: TUTU-History of Food and Eating Practices (CNPq-UFMG) and GESTO-Material Elements of Culture and Heritage (CNPq-UFMG). Her research areas include Food History, Food Heritage, Memory and Oral History, Intangible Cultural Heritage, and Popular Culture.
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