ENGLISH TITLE: Chewing God: Ideologies of Religious Meaning and Mastication

ABSTRACT: In religious fundamentalisms, the articulation of the semantic field of food essentially consists in identifying a series of frontiers, the more constraining the better, that distinguish between believers and disbelievers, insiders and outsiders, friends and enemies. The fundamentalism of secularism (laïcité), as it seeks to subjugate a minority by humiliating its food frontiers, does not escape this definition. However, there exists a different way of constructing religious identity in relation to food. This way, which dates fromthe Talmudic reading of the Torah, but which unfolds especially after Augustine’s invention of “an interior mouth of the soul”, prescribes an identity that is not determined through interdiction of such or such food but through promotion of an interior eating technique, symbolizing the relation to be held with transcendence and its word.

KEYWORDS: mastication; religion; semiotics; hermeneutics; fundamentalism.