Feeding the spirits: cooking, offering and reclaiming lộc in late socialist Vietnam

ABSTRACT

Food is intrinsic to Vietnamese ritual activities. Religious practices involve cooking for ancestors and the presentation of food to deities, spirits of national heroes, tutelary spirits, as well as to wandering ghosts of war dead at various localities and in multiple contexts. In conjunction with food offerings, people burn incense and transmit prayers at altars and shrines, and in a response, spirits bestow lộc, blessed food, which is then distributed and consumed by the ceremonies’ participants. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper explores food rituals and worshippers’ relationships to intangible realms in late socialist Vietnam. I argue that the otherworld is accessed and experienced as real through practices of cooking for the spirits and of presenting devotional food and other objects. By investigating the sites of food offerings as well as the types of food and the variations in presentation styles, this paper emphasizes the agency of food and highlights differences in believers’ perceptions about social distance to ancestors, deities and other spiritual beings.

KEYWORDS:

• Food
• lộc
• popular religious practices
• offering
• materiality
• Vietnam

Acknowledgments

This paper draws on ethnographic research in Vietnam, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) for a project on ‘Religion, Media and Materiality. Spiritual Economies in Southeast Asia’ (HU 1019/ 4-1). I am grateful to Birgit Meyer for inviting me to participate in the research programme ‘Religious Matters in an Entangled World’ at the University of Utrecht (October 2019) with its focus on sacred food. I thank the convener, Annalisa Butticci, and the participants of the conference ‘Gastro-Politics and Gastro-Ethics of the Sacred and the Secular in Contemporary Plural Societies’ at the Meertens Institute, Amsterdam (November 2019), for providing valuable suggestions and comments on an earlier draft of this paper. The conference was organized with support from the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Department of Religious Diversity, Göttingen, the research programme ‘Religious Matters in an Entangled World’, Utrecht University, and the Meertens Institute, Amsterdam. My sincere thanks to two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 All names are pseudonyms.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the German Research Foundation [grant number HU 1019/ 4-1].