Russian Old Believers' nutritional practices in Uruguay as an identity marker

Abstract (English)

The Old Believers are a special ethnic and confessional group of Russians that appeared after the church reform in Russia in the middle of the 16th century. There are many varieties and trends within the Old Believers. Until the beginning of the 20th century, they were persecuted, many of them left Russia and settled in neighboring countries. After the 1917 revolution, groups of Old Believers from Siberia and the Far East moved to China, and in the late 1940s migrated to South American countries. The paper will examine the nutritional practices of the community of Old Believers living in Uruguay in the colony of Las Pitangas (Guichón). The data was collected during my own field research in Uruguay in 2015, 2018 and 2023. The purpose of the paper is to identify the differences in their own and borrowed nutritional practices as well as to determine their role as an identity marker of the community under discussion.
All groups of Old Believers are extremely closed to aliens: they live compactly, engage exclusively in agricultural activities, wear traditional Russian clothes, celebrate religious holidays, and strictly follow food rules and prohibitions. The Old Believers have strict prohibitions in food culture: for example, they are forbidden to drink coffee, tea, eat seafood, they keep religious fasts. At the same time, their diet includes new foods that were unfamiliar to them in Russia: different types of beans, fruits. Based on field research, I will show how Old Believer communities in Uruguay adapt to new geographical conditions and what rules and prohibitions they develop when consuming products they have become familiar with in South American countries.