Ascetic, Disciplinary and Self-limiting Practices as a Factor of Dietary Strategies in Modern Russia

This article analyzes ascetic and disciplinary practices and principles of self‑restraint applied by modern Russian people to the elaboration of dietary strategies. Socialization of dietary practices is related to their rationalization and regulation on the basis of standards and values having cultural and social nature. Such standards are: methods of religious ascesis, prescribing food limitations as prerequisites of spiritual purification; disciplinary practices regulating space, time, technology of nutrition; principles of self‑restraint due to the imperatives of maintaining the socially approved physicality. In modern Russia following the norms of the Orthodox asceticism is not always dictated by institutional religiosity and belonging to the Church. It can be motivated by factors of identity, tradition, common views of nutrition physiology. Disciplinary practices were spread to nutrition in the context of the modern society institution, such as industrial enterprise, school of medical facility. Disciplinary practices reflect the institutionalized dominance of society over an individual. They are today undermined in Russia as in other countries, particularly by the spread of fast food allowing to liberate nutrition from the rigid space‑time constraints. Self‑restraint practices in nutrition are popularized under the influence of ideal body image, which is the result of conscious efforts as opposed to natural physicality. Regulatory physicality becomes a form of society control over its members on the basis of their own choice in favor of self‑restraints, healthy nutrition and diet. There is a contradiction in our country between the traditional food habits aimed at satiety and the imperative of self‑restraint for the purposes of forming a healthy and slim body. This contradiction is aggravated by the loosening of institutional control over regulatory physicality and consumer hedonistic values. The majority of Russians still solve this contradiction in favor of traditional nutrition practices. This is stimulated by medicalization of everyday life presenting means of maintaining regulatory physicality without restraints in eating

nutrition practices, ascesis, disciplinary practices, self‑restraint, regulatory physicality