Working for the Saints: Food, memory and the senses in North Queensland

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

his 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.