Working for the Saints
Food, memory and the senses in North Queensland
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/qre.26006Keywords:
Catholic devotion, commensality, Italian diaspora, Feast of the Three Saints, food and memory, lived religion, North QueenslandAbstract
This article presents some of the main dynamics of the social reproduction of an Italian community through an ethnographic study of the Feast of the Three Saints in Silkwood, North Queensland. It has been celebrated annually there since being imported from the Sicilian village of St Alfio in 1950. As a celebration of Italian sociality and the Italian way of life, the Feast offers a particular opportunity to study the relationship between popular religion, food production and consumption, the senses, memory and materiality. From this perspective, I argue that the Feast as ‘lived religion’ should be understood not only as an expression of Catholic devotion, but also in terms of the construction of a ‘domus’, defined as a social unit and a community based on shared values and practices enacted and continually renewed by the preparation of food and the sensorial aspects of commensality. In the ‘sacred street theatre’ of the Feast, it is by means of these food practices that a community comes into being by sharing knowledge, memories and feelings.
[A religious feast in Sicily] is, above all, an existential explosion. (Sciascia 1965: 30)1
This completely irreligious way of understanding and professing a religion … has its roots in a profound materialism, a total rejection of all that entails mystery, invisible revelation, metaphysics. (Sciascia 1965: 21)
References
Abbots, E-J 2016, ‘Approaches to food and migration: Rootedness, being and belonging’, in JA Klein and JL Watson (eds), The handbook of food and anthropology, Bloomsbury, London, pp. 115–32.
Baldassar, L 2001, Visits home: Migration experiences between Italy and Australia, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne.
Bosworth, R and Melia, M 1991, ‘The Italian “feste” of Western Australia and the myth of the universal church’, in R Bosworth and M Melia (eds), ‘Aspects of ethnicity in Western Australia’, special issue of Studies in Western Australian History, vol. 12, pp. 71–84.
Bourdieu, P 1995 [1977], Outline of a theory of practice, trans. R Nice, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Cannell, F 2006, ‘Introduction’, in F Cannell (ed.), The anthropology of Christianity, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, pp. 1–50.
Clemente, P 1997, ‘Paese/paesi’, in M Isnenghi (ed.), I luoghi della memoria. Strutture ed eventi dell’Italia unita, Laterza, Rome, pp. 5–37.
Colpi, T 1993, ‘Origins and campanilismo in Bedford’s Italian community’, in L Sponza and A Tosi (eds), A century of Italian emigration to Britain 1880–1980s: Five essays. University of Reading, Reading, pp. 56–77.
De Martino, E 1975 [1958], Morte e pianto rituale: dal lamento funebre antico al pianto di Maria, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri.
Douglass, WA 1995. From Italy to Ingham: Italians in North Queensland, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane.
Engelke M 2011, ‘Material religion’, in RA Orsi (ed.), The Cambridge companion to religious studies, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 209–29.
Girola, S 2001, The three Saints: Faith history tradition from Sicily to Queensland, trans. P Giorgi, Minerva E&S. Brisbane.
Girola, S 2003, ‘Saints in the suitcase: Italian popular Catholicism in Australia’, The Australasian Catholic Record, vol. 80, no. 2, pp. 164–74.
Hage, G 2010, ‘Migration, food, memory, and home-building’, in S Radstone and B Schwarz (eds), Memory: Histories, theories, debates, Fordham University Press, New York, pp. 416–27.
Howell, F.C. 2018, Food, festival and religion: Materiality and place in Italy, Bloomsbury, London.
James, R 2004, ‘The reliable beauty of aroma: Staples of food and cultural production among Italian-Australians’, The Australian Journal of Anthropology, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 23–39.
Lombardo, L 2018, L’impresa della neve in Sicilia: tra lusso e consumo di massa. Le Fate, Ragusa.
McKibben, CL 2011. ‘Between public and private: The transnational community of Sicilians in Monterey, California’, in L Baldassar and DR Gabaccia (eds), Intimacy and Italian migration: Gender and domestic lives in a mobile world, Fordham University Press, New York, pp. 143–51.
Meyer, B and Houtman, D 2012, ‘Introduction: Material religion – how things matter’ in D Houtman and B Meyer (eds), Things: Religion and the question of materiality, Fordham University Press, New York, pp. 1–23.
Morgan, D 2010, ‘Introduction: The matter of belief’ in D Morgan (ed.), Religion and material culture: The matter of belief, Routledge, London, pp. 1–12.
Orsi, RA 2002 [1985], The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950 (2nd ed.), Yale University Press, New Haven, CT.
Paganoni, A 2003, Valiant struggles and benign neglect: Italians, church, and religious societies in diaspora: The Australian experience from 1950 to 2000, The Centre for Migration Studies, New York.
Paganoni, A and O’Connor, D 1999, Se la processione va bene: Religiosità popolare italiana nel Sud Australia, Centro Studi Emigrazione, Rome.
Palumbo, B. 2004, ‘“The war of the saints”: Religion, politics, and the poetics of time in a Sicilian town’, Comparative Studies in Society and History vol. 46, no. 1, pp. 4–34.
Parasecoli, F 2014, ‘Food, identity and cultural reproduction in immigrant communities’, Social Research, vol. 81, no. 2, pp. 415–39.
Pittarello, A 2010 [1980], ‘“Soup without salt”: The Australian Catholic Church and the Italian migrant – a comparative study in the sociology of religion, Centre for Migration Studies, Sydney.
Romana, L 2007, Neviere e nevaioli: la conserva e il commercio della neve in Sicilia centro-occidentale (1500–1900), Ente Parco delle Madonie, Palermo.
Romana, L 2019, Le vie del freddo in Sicilia. Dalla neviera alla sorbettiera, Associazione Culturale Nico Marino, Cefalù.
Sciascia, L 1965, ‘Una candela al santo e una al serpente’. In F Scianna and L Sciascia, Feste religiose in Sicilia: fotografie di Fernando Scianna, Leonardo Da Vinci, Bari, pp. 9–35.
Seremetakis, CN 1994a, ‘The memory of the senses, part I: Marks of the transitory’, in CN Seremetakis (ed.), The senses still: Perception and memory as material culture in modernity, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp. 1–18.
Seremetakis, CN 1994b, ‘The memory of the senses, part II: Still acts’, in CN Seremetakis (ed.), The senses still: Perception and memory as material culture in modernity, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp. 23–43.
Simmel, G 2002 [1908], ‘The stranger’, in CJ Calhoun et al. (eds), Classical sociological theory. Blackwell, Malden, MA, pp. 253–7.
Sutton, DE 2010, ‘Food and the senses’, Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 39, pp. 209–23.
Verga, G 2017 [1880], ‘Guerra di santi’, in Tutte le novelle, e-text, pp. 266-77. Available from: https://www.liberliber.it/online/autori/autori-v/giovanni-verga/tutte-le-novelle [20 January 2022].
