Biography
Alexa Rollow is a Master of Divinity student at Yale Divinity School. She currently holds a Bachelor of Arts in religion and international studies from Baylor University. Her research interests include Judeo-Christian deathways and bereavement, ritual implications of food and foodways, and art objects’ ability to mediate divine-human interactions.
Paper Abstract
In her book When Species Meet, Donna Haraway depicts creaturely interdependence, dubbing companion species “queer messmates in mortal play.” Eating exemplifies this relationship because it ties species together in a food web and blurs bodily boundaries. As the eater disembodies the eaten, the food is re-embodied inside the animal which consumes it. Food’s connection to interspecies entanglement takes on further significance in the Hebrew Bible when examined in Iron Age Levant burial practices. This paper explores how the ritual act itself embodies the dead and establishes ancestors as a companion species to the living. Ancient Near Eastern food offerings to the dead thus exemplify bodily entanglement because of their association with eating and the connection they maintain between the living and their dead.