ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the ways in which rituals involving dining and dress in particular worked to foster group cohesion and deal with potential threats to community. Routine behaviors result in ways of being, certain socially developed attitudes and moral positions. Boundary maintenance is not a superficial category, interested in the external policing of bodies or behaviors; these behaviors are significant because of their internal consequences, their impact on the moral attitudes of group adherents. The meal practices of ancient associations have not tended to figure in scholarly conversations regarding morality. Scholarship on early Christianity has never hesitated to associate morality with Paul's regulations for the distribution and consumption of food. Of all human practices, dress lends itself best to repetition, as none of us can leave our private, domestic spaces each day without participating in some form of dress.
