Food as Religious Resistance: Tracing religious transmission and ritual life in Secret Police Archives

Abstract

This article highlights the significance of food as both a means of sustaining and growing underground religious communities during communism and as a form of spiritual resistance to the communist state. Based on a set of insider-informer surveillance reports from an operation targeting an underground network of Orthodox dissenters, so-called Inochentist-Stilists, in 1950s and 60s Romania, I focus on the diverse references to and resonances of food within the community. In the context of the transformation of agricultural production through collectivisation, of food requisitioning, drought, and dietary change, this geographically dispersed community reshaped their religious life around the supply and distribution of ritually required foodstuffs, developing distinct distribution networks and practices in an effort to combat attempts by the secret police to infiltrate and disrupt the movement. I argue that attention to the heretofore somewhat neglected foodways of religious communities can contribute to a fuller understanding of religious transmission and ritual life during communism.