Narratives of Hospitality and Feeding in Tibetan Ritual

This article proposes that many Tibetan rituals are shaped by a language of creating, giving, and eating food. Drawing on a range of premodern texts and observation of a week-long Accomplishing Medicine (sman sgrub) ritual based on those texts, we explore ritualized food interactions from a narrative perspective. Through the creation, offering, and con-sumption of food, ritual participants, including Buddhas, deities, and other unseen beings, create and maintain variant identities and relation-ships with each other. Using a ritual tradition that crosses religious and medical domains in Tibet, we examine how food and eating honors, constructs, and maintains an appropriate and spatiotemporally situated community order with a gastronomic contract familiar to all participants. FOOD AND EATING IN TIBETAN BUDDHISM FOOD AND EATING have long been objects of study for anthropol-ogists and historians of Asian cultures and regions. Some have decoded the symbolic languages of food or analyzed eating as a performative activ-ity, and others have thought about the economy of food exchange and th