Human-induced environmental change is mostly researched by scientific areas like ecology and engineering, emphasizing flows of materials and energy typical of modern industrial societies through chains of extraction, production, consumption, and disposal. However, as Marina Fisher-Kowalski argues, these processes are also strongly social, relating to collective habits, aspirations, and beliefs. The relation between such ecological and social systems thus demands greater acknowledgment. In Judeo-Christianity, religion and food are intrinsically linked, as evidenced in both the Old and the New Testaments. At least since James Frazer, Anthropologists have encountered this link across historically and geographically disperse religions. However, specific spatial relations between religion and food are seldom discussed. Christian ecumenical space includes a ritualistic reenactment of the Last Supper, but other forms of symbolic and literal links between food and religion can be found in wider traditions and spatial organizations. This presentation explores relationships between food and religion in two case-studies from the Lisbon Region. First, the Janas village (Sintra) with its emblematic circular-plan S. Mamede Chapel, used for the blessing of cattle and whose yard periodically harbors a fair. The second, the village of Santo Isidro de Pegões (Montijo), an Agricultural Colony with a church by Eugénio Correia founded in the 1930s by the New State, a conservative dictatorship that ruled Portugal until 1974. In both Janas and Santo Isidro, the religious buildings played an important role in community life. But what symbolic relations between agriculture and religion are at play? Are these potential lessons to be understood in today’s culture, vastly different towards spirituality and food? Throughout a morphological analysis and a phenomenological approach, we aim to portray the differences between a vernacular and a planned rural settlement, emphasizing religion and food as linked modes of spiritual and physical sustenance.

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Religious architecture,Vernacular architecture,Agricultural colonies,Rural Settlements,Morphological Analysis

• Other Social Sciences - Social Sciences
• Arts (arts, history of arts, performing arts, music) - Humanities
• Other Humanities - Humanities